File modification time woes

[Choi]

Here's a weird thing I'd appreciate some help with...I keep my music on a master hard disk and use a back up program to copy from the master onto the DroidBox over Samba.

However, I am finding that after the DroidBox is rebooted the file modification times are earlier than before, even though they appear correct before the reboot.

The time between my PC and DroidBox are within one minute of each other, the discrepancy is something like 10 minutes..

This is happening in OpenElec and in Android...

This hobbles my strategy for keeping my music collection up to date...since I can't simply copy the deltas across.

Any ideas???

 

[Choi]

Lol, did some Googling...seems managing back ups arent as simple as comparing the file modification time. Happily I think I can manage with the archive bit.

 

[Choi]

Right, I did some testing this morning. Seems the issue is with exFat volumes, ext4 behaves impeccably.

 

[ChrisM]

Thanks for updating us, just in case you didn't come across it during your googling, if you ever need to return to timestamp based backups, --modify-window=x (where x is expressed in seconds) might help, if you use rsync for your backups, grabbed from the second reply over at http://askubuntu.com/questions/112863/rsync-not-working-between-ntfs-fat-and-ext

 

[Choi]

Yep, thanks for that. I will use if I move to rsync. I'm actually using a Windows program called SyncBack.

Sadly the archive bit did not work either. Eventually, I figured out the problem was in the initial copy, where I plugged the FAT disk into the USB port and copied using ES File Explorer. Seems the file system caches the time stamps so they look good immediately afterwards. Of course this gets purged after reboot so the subsequent sync over Samba looked bad.

I bit the bullet in the end by doing the initial copy through Samba and left it running overnight. Since then it's been good. Especially since I found SambaDroid

That paves the way for the next big job -- rip all my CDs to flac..