Sort order not matching

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2011-12-07, 17:58 UTC

Okay, I tried a forum search, but there were too many hits and none that I looked at seemed to apply...

I use SyncBack to back up files from my hard drive to a network drive. I have SyncBack set to force date and time stamps in both places.

Since I have started using v8.0, I have noticed that both panes in TC, even though they are set to sort by time, don't show the same order of files. A directory compare says everything is okay (the same), but the sort order is different. (I tried going back to 7.56a to check things, but bailed out because it looked like I was going to lose some TC settings.)

And is seems as if the hard drive, ie, local copy, is the one that is not sorted correctly, ie, it's not alphabetical. But time stamp, down to the number of seconds, is the same on both sides.

I'm running XPPro, sp3, TC8.0b11. Network is a MS network.

Are there fractional seconds that could be off? (Does the system use hundredths of seconds?)

edit: "AccessTime" parameter is not set, so I assume it's the default =0.
Created and Modified dates are the same for both files. Accessed dates are different. TC should be sorting on the Modified date&time I'd think.

Post by *petermad » 2011-12-07, 23:45 UTC

Maybe you have set a secondary sort order (by accident) for one of the panels - is there a little "2" next to the sort direction arrow in the the tabstop header above one of the file panels?

Maybe a screenshot of what you see could help us.

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2011-12-08, 03:03 UTC

No secondary sort is set. In fact, sorting by time and then a secondary sort by Name doesn't fix the problem.

Will try to post a screen shot tomorrow - I do have one from the last time, I think. I think it might have something to do with Syncback, but I had not noticed it before I ran TC 8.0.

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2012-02-10, 21:36 UTC

Still something going on here.

TC8.0b19 on WinXPRo32sp3.

Language is English. Nothing odd set in system.

Sort method - Alphabetical, considering accents.

Two files reside on primary local C:\ drive.

TC set to sort by date, decending. No secondary sort order.

No unicode characters.

File starting with "Holland"... was Files>Change Attributes>Change Date/Time and clicked on on "Load from file under cursor"

File under cursor started with "WT0136"...

Why does listing show "WT0136" file on top of "Holland" file with Date column showing the same date and time, and check of file attributes to the same seconds?

Ctrl-click on Name column still lists WT0136... file above Holland... no matter if Name column is sorted ascending or descending.

I don't remember have an issue with this until some of the recent versions, including the 7.5x series.

What am I missing????

Post by *petermad » 2012-02-11, 12:50 UTC

2Jon Canale

As you can see: http://madsenworld.dk/tcmd/datesorting.png - it works fine here.

Could you please provide a screenshot of what you see in your TC - it might give us a clue to what is wrong.

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2012-02-11, 14:41 UTC

http://jsc-screenshot.wikispaces.com/file/detail/useless_screen_shot.jpg

Now that that is out of the way...

Files have 3 dates associated with them: Created, Modified, and Accessed. Which of those does TC use? For both of these files, Modified dates and times are the same. The Created and Accessed dates are different. For this particular case, the Created and Access dates are more recent for the file starting with "H", yet the screen display has the file starting with "W" listed first.

What is the difference in sorting order between a files on my hard drive, and files on a network drive?

Are there settings in TC to control any of this? "SortUpper=0" is how it was set. I changed to "=2" and it did not make a difference for this case.

Post by *petermad » 2012-02-11, 15:24 UTC

Are you sure you placed the cursor on WT0136_shipper_Vxx_ClutchCompr_120106.pdf and not on WT0136_shipper_Vxx_ClutchCompr_120106.doc when you used the "Load from file under cursor" function.

Even though the time down to the seconds are the same it might not be so down to the 10th of seconds, and if the files are on an NFTS partition that could matter.

Try and select all 3 files on the left side of your screenshot and then set the time of all 3 files to 03.28.00p - does that make a difference

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2012-02-11, 15:33 UTC

The seconds values for the Modified dates are both exactly the same, since the one file's timestamp was set by TC using the "use file under cursor" button. Confirmed by looking at the Explorer file info as well.

Also see my edited post with more details.

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2012-02-11, 15:41 UTC

petermad,

I selected the three files together, and set all of their times together, now they sort as I originally would have expected.

I don't think I messed up when I originally set the time in TC.

And to make sure of that, I reset the "Holland" file date to match the date of a another "WT0136" file in the list above it, and I got the same behaviour with the W file listed before the H file with the Date column sorting dates in descending order.

And yes, I've seen this behaviour across my local drive and a network drive (see first posting), but these two files were in the same directory on my local drive.

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2012-02-11, 15:46 UTC

Found another possibility. Setting "AccessTime=1" allows TC to sort by last accessed time instead of modified date. Default is =0. It's not set at all in my ini file, so I should be =0, sort by modified date.

Post by *petermad » 2012-02-11, 16:07 UTC

What is the difference in sorting order between a files on my hard drive, and files on a network drive?

The time resolution can be different. For example on FAT32 file systems the time can only be set with a 2 seconds granularity, whereas it is set with 100 nsec granularity on NTFS file systems.

Files have 3 dates associated with them: Created, Modified, and Accessed. Which of those does TC use?

TC uses the Modified date.

The seconds values for the Modified dates are both exactly the same, since the one file's timestamp was set by TC using the "use file under cursor" button. Confirmed by looking at the Explorer file info as well.

Maybe that is the problem (needs to be tested) - Maybe TC rounds NTFS times of to nearest whole second when using that function.

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2012-02-11, 16:29 UTC

Testing! I just used shelldetails to set a custom column on the modified date and time stamp, which shows the seconds. While the custom view was in place, I did the "file under cursor" thing. Guess what - I saw the file stamp of the file I was changing be off by two seconds from the one it was supposed to be set to. And then I pulled up the Explorer view - the Modified stamp in Explorer looked "correct", ie, the seconds stamp was what I expected it to be.

To restate:
"WT" file I wanted to match was :16 seconds.
After changing "Holland" file, shelldetails showed :14 seconds!
For same file, Explorer showed :16 seconds!!!

This is starting to look like some kind of odd TC bug.

Christian??

Post by *white » 2012-02-11, 18:39 UTC

Jon Canale wrote:TC8.0b19 on WinXPRo32sp3.

Language is English. Nothing odd set in system.

Sort method - Alphabetical, considering accents.

Two files reside on primary local C:\ drive.

TC set to sort by date, decending. No secondary sort order.

No unicode characters.

File starting with "Holland"... was Files>Change Attributes>Change Date/Time and clicked on on "Load from file under cursor"

File under cursor started with "WT0136"...

Why does listing show "WT0136" file on top of "Holland" file with Date column showing the same date and time, and check of file attributes to the same seconds?

Ctrl-click on Name column still lists WT0136... file above Holland... no matter if Name column is sorted ascending or descending.

I don't remember have an issue with this until some of the recent versions, including the 7.5x series.

I can confirm this issue. It works fine up to version 7.04a. In 7.50 beta 1 the following was introduced:

HISTORY.TXT wrote:10.08.07 Added: All time-related functions now use the NTFS time instead of the old FAT file system time -> also dates before 1980 supported

The issue described above does not occur on FAT volumes. On NTFS volumes the times look the same but actually are not.

Note that the file time stamps on NTFS drives are rounded to the nearest 100 nanoseconds (see here). When setting the time stamp using Files>Change Attributes>Change Date/Time and click on "Load from file under cursor", the time seems to be rounded to seconds.

You can retrieve time stamps in higher accuracy than seconds using:

Code: Select all

WMIC DATAFILE WHERE Name="c:\\temp\\test.txt" get Name, LastModified

Change c:\\temp\\test.txt to match your file.

Jon Canale · Post by *Jon Canale » 2012-02-11, 20:21 UTC

White - thank you for weighing in. I think you nailed it.

Never heard of WMIC, but looked it up. Seems to be a part of XPPro, but not XPHome, on which I'm currently working (laptop with Pro is nearby).

Test on laptop shows what you are describing. Time down to the seconds is the same, but file set by TC is 20120126105914.000000-300, whereas original file is nnnsame.329000-300.

I think I like the old method better. Now, when you have two lists of supposedly same files, they may (and do) sort differently because of this time stamp difference.

It seems like it is up to Mr. Ghisler to make some changes to make this better, if he is so inclined.

Thanks.