My file and folder timestamps are showing the wrong time

Over the summer in the UK (when we were on British Summer Time) my files and folders had the correct time on them, but ever since Daylight Savings kicked in and moved us back to Greenwich Mean Time, my files (depending on what app is used to view the file details) keeps showing the timestamps as an hour less as to what they should be.

The thing is, I had this problem a few years ago and it somehow got corrected, but it's come up again. So how do I fix this problem and show the correct time in file timestamps, regardless of DST changes?

This is an example of what my problem is:

I use a program called Attribute Changer (https://www.petges.lu/) to change attributes and also date and time stamps to whatever I want, and I'm certain it takes account of Daylight Savings Time.

In the examples below, this is what I get after I use this program with the timestamp "30/09/2018 12:00" on the same set of files:



In Windows Explorer, the timestamps are the same as when I set them in Attribute Changer.

However, two other programs I use (ImgBurn and 7-Zip) show the hour as different, an hour earlier.



Is there a way to solve this problem?

I don't have Imgburn but see the same effect in 7-Zip without using Attribute Changer. Files and folders last modified in the summer are shown one hour earlier in 7-zip than Explorer.

According to developer of 7-Zip by default it stores last modified as UTC by default (when avaliable) while Explorer shows local time.

See : https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/d...read/4b039454/

Thanks for the info, lx07.

So I see that the situation is worse if you're in a time zone which is not GMT (the Moscow guy, for example).

So Win10 uses UTC, and there's no way to change that, or force the software I mentioned to change instead?

If not, then that's a shame. I would just prefer the timestamp to be consistent at 12:00 (I hate odd numbers like 11)

I just checked and found that UTC is exactly the same as GMT.

The screenshots I took above are from local GMT time, so why are they off by one hour?

NTFS uses UTC. Historically Windows and zip files used FAT standards (which is is local time and only 2 decimal places).

You can read about it here. File Times - Windows applications | Microsoft Docs

The FAT file system records times on disk in local time. GetFileTime retrieves cached UTC times from the FAT file system. When it becomes daylight saving time, the time retrieved by GetFileTime is off an hour, because the cache is not updated. When you restart the computer, the cached time that GetFileTime retrieves is correct. FindFirstFile retrieves the local time from the FAT file system and converts it to UTC by using the current settings for the time zone and daylight saving time. Therefore, if it is daylight saving time, FindFirstFile takes daylight saving time into account, even if the file time you are converting is in standard time.

A really easy way to see the difference is to look at dir in powershell and then in cmd. Notice the time difference in the "PerfLogs" folder here : Powershell is showing 09:33, cmd is showing local 08:33. Actually I don't know which of these times is "correct" as I can't remember but you can see the local/UTC at play.



GMT=UTC incidentally, but in the summer your local time was BST so there was an hours difference. This is a red-herring though as I'm on Central European time. The difference seen is between converting UTC to local now vs then.

bro67, I looked at all that:

The registry entries seemed to be both on GMT.
The clock was already set to Internet Time (quite a time-saver, no need to manually set the clock when it drifts).
I started Windows Time on Automatic (it wasn't before).

No changes to 7-Zip or anything else, and CMD and PowerShell report different times, as stated.