I have a large MSI project which includes several hundred MB of graphical asset files which are pulled into the MSI from a file server. These files are installed on the user's machine via the MSI and then a Windows Scheduled Task uses Robocopy to keep the files up to date with a file server mirror.
The problem is that the MSI installs the files with the modified time stamp of the source file based on the locale of the build PC rather than updating it to the locale of the target PC. So for any user that is ahead of the time zone used by the machine to build the MSI, all of the installed files are considered to be out of date by Robocopy, negating the benefit of including the files in the MSI and causing huge network traffic for thousands of users.
Example:
Source file on the file server has a time stamp of 3rd August 2020 09:00 and the build PC local is set to UTC.
Destination PC locale is UTC+1 but the file is installed with a time stamp of 09:00 as opposed to 10:00
Result: Robocopy thinks that the file needs to be updated because the file server time is returned based on the user's local e.g. 10:00
If I manually copy files from the source to the destination, the time stamp is synchronized with the locale.
Is there a way to tell the MSI to set the modified time stamp of installed files to be updated according to the locale of the installation PC?