Ah, autumn... that magical time of the year when the leaves turn majestic shades of yellow, red, and orange. When a bracing nip in the air puts a zing in one's step. When a new fall television season rescues us from a seemingly interminable sentence of summer reruns. And, perhaps most importantly and magically of all, when we get back that hour that was so cruelly wrested away from us way back in spring. April is the cruellest month, indeed; it's a bittersweet bargain to trade an hour of sleep for an extra hour of daylight during the summer months. Sure, it may seem worth it in the long run, but losing that initial hour is a real trial for those of us who are already terminally sleep-deprived. So that's just one more reason that autumn is our favorite season-- those sixty precious minutes are returned to us, none the worse for wear.

What a shock it was, then, to trudge into the office after a gloriously long bye-bye-Daylight-Savings-Time sleep to find AtAT's PowerTower PRo furiously updating its Sherlock find-by-content index, approximately one third of the way through the task-- and reporting twenty-six more hours to go. After emitting an admittedly Scooby-like noise of surprise and confusion, we canceled the operation and started digging around online to see what was up. It wasn't long before we came across an old Apple TechNote describing what had happened. It seems that Mac OS Extended format (commmonly known as HFS+) has a known "issue" with any changes to the Mac's PRAM-stored offset to Greenwich Mean Time. If you're making your own Scooby-like noises right now, here's the skinny: HFS+ stores the creation and modification time of each file in Greenwich Mean Time. The Mac OS then stores an offset to that in Parameter RAM, or PRAM, based on your time zone setting. Well, the upshot of this is, any changes to the PRAM-stored offset (such as changing your time zone or-- you guessed it-- taking your Mac off of Daylight Savings Time) will effectively alter the modification times of every single file on an HFS+ disk. The result? Funkiness like Sherlock thinking it has to update the index for the entire hard disk, since every file has apparently changed since the last index update. And when we run Retrospect Express later to back up our system, it, too, will think it needs to back up every file, instead of the hundred or so that really changed since the last backup. So much for getting that hour back...

This isn't new to Mac OS 8.5-- we remember the issue arising when 8.1 came out and the first few brave souls upgraded to HFS+. (In fact, the TechNote mentioned above was created when Mac OS 8.1 first hit the scene.) At that time, we didn't notice any problems. Incidentally, Apple also claims that this "issue" can result in broken aliases, for some reason which, we admit, eludes us completely. We haven't had any trouble with our multitude of aliases, though-- perhaps it's an 8.1 issue only. Guess we'll wait and see.