Deeply Touched

Wednesday, 4 April, 2007

I run a Synology DiskStation DS-101j on my network principally for backups. Its a nice bit of kit with lots of goodies on board; printer server, web server (Apache, PHP, MySQL), photo server, ftp server… the list goes on. I use Second Copy to backup from my main PC and this takes about 20 minutes depending upon what is going across the network (and thats at least my 1Gb mail archive). I set the backup going at 10am this morning and returned at 4pm to find it still running. I was a little surprised to say the least and, after a little digging, found that it was backing up the entire disk. Wondering what had happened, the penny then dropped that we changed to British Summer Time last weekend which might be the root cause of the problem.

A little Googling later confirmed that this would appear to be an unfixed bug in the DiskStation and there were numerous wails and gnashing of teeth at the problems this caused twice a year. The obvious answer is to reset the time of the files on the DiskStation. In this case, adding 1 hour to all the files. A rather helpful message pointed to Chronos a freeware Windows program that allows you to manipulate time stamps on files and is incredibly flexible. It was a 2 minute job to select the files on the DiskStation and add 1 hour to time stamps, then set it running. This has indeed solved the problem (and introduced me to a useful piece of software), but it would be better if the root cause was fixed. Over to Synology…..

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