DST and HFS Plus glitch: a utility that can help (and more)

Regarding our previous report of a glitch involving the Daylight Savings Time setting of the Date & Time control panel when using an HFS Plus formatted drive:

A utility that can help Glenn Austin has created a utility called HFSPLUS DST Timefix, that address the problem. He writes: "HFS stores dates based on GMT rather than local time. When you select DST, it affects the time difference between local time and GMT. Since HFS uses a single value to convert between GMT and local time, and selecting DST affects that single value, AND the HFS format doesn't have any way of determining whether a date/time was a standard time or daylight savings time, all the times get adjusted when you switch into or out of DST (yes, times move backwards if you create something in DST and then change to standard time!). This extension basically tells HFS to use the standard time offset between local time and GMT, and makes sure that HFS can't mistakenly change that value back when you change the DST setting."

Or just avoid the DST check box altogether More generally, many users (including myself) have figured out that if you just "manually" change the time by an hour, rather than use the DST checkbooks, you should avoid these hassles. A note on the Dantz web site, concerning how all of this affects Retrospect back-ups, suggests this as well. Personally, I have never used the DST option.