Black Holes, Time Travel and Windows 8.1 OneDrive Sync

If you are seeing this error, never fear.  Your computer files haven’t fallen through a black hole, or travelled back in time… and OneDrive Sync is probably working just fine. 

Time in relationship to Computers, Devices, Operating Systems, etc all began on January 1st 1970.  January 1st 1970  is considered the Epoch Time, and all minutes, hours days, weeks, months, and years since January 1st 1970 are counted in the number of seconds since 1970. 

Today’s date 9/9/2014 at 11:27AM EST represented in EPOCH time is 1410276437  or 1410276437 since January 1st 1970.

The reason your Computer, Device, OS, is blinking 12/31/1969 (prior to EPOCH time ) is that it is having an issue with either its internal clock, or the clock for the service it is trying to contact.

In this particular case, OneDrive is having an issue translating the Computer clock time into EPOCH time….so it displays the time in the only thing it understands which is 12/31/1969.

It’s kind of like you thinking the date is 12/31/1969 when you don’t know what date it is.  You don’t behave that way, because you are a person and not a dumb machine.  You can remember yesterday.  You don’t care what the date is…. You just know you’re late for work again. 

Computers can’t do that.  They have to know how many seconds have elapsed since 1/1/1970 in order to know what date/time it is.

I gotta go.  I’m a day late for a class.

Dave