In recent days I have been applying the last-ever Windows maintenance to all of my Windows 7 systems, and then creating a drive image for each. When looking at the image files created, I was startled to see that I had in fact created them tomorrow.
On closer inspection I noticed that the image files had been created exactly 5 hours in the future (and because I was creating the images late at night, the date had flipped over to the following day).Now as I understand it, in the days of PC-DOS it was usual to set the hardware clock to local time. I am not sure what Windows does, but I suspect that it sets the hardware clock to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, now also called Universal Time), but applies the timezone offset to the times displayed. So the times that the user sees are always local time, even though the hardware clock is set to GMT. (I am happy to be corrected if this understanding is wrong.)
I think that IFD is essentially a PC-DOS program. The evidence would seem to suggest that there is a hard-coded 5-hour adjustment to the time used for the image files. This may be correct for users in the USA, but I live in the UK (where Greenwich Mean Time was invented!).
IFD already has a mechanism for specifying and remembering options, so it looks as though it would be a relatively simple matter to add another option to allow the user to specify his timezone offset. This would not cope with the start and end of Daylight Saving Time, but users of the NTFS file system are already accustomed to file timestamps changing by one hour when DST starts or ends, so I don't think that it is essential for IFD to adjust for DST.
I hope that you will consider this for a possible future enhancement to IFD. Thank you.
-- from CyberSimian in the UK
