I'm experiencing clock drift on my Mac Mini of 1-2 minutes every day. Like questioner here, I get relief if I open Date & Time from preferences every day or two. It doesn't stop the drift, just corrects the time back to normal. This tells me that the time server configured (or at least the one that's consulted when I use the UI to update time) is an accurate time server and is still alive, but there's some other force at work to drag time away from that. Unusual here is that while most systems lose time, I'm gaining time each day [and it's been a gain since I first observed this problem].
This problem persists since before I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mavericks when Mavericks was released.
This problem persists since installing a fresh "coin battery" (yes the box is 4-5 years old, so a dying battery could've been part of the problem). It's not unheard of for a new battery to not have charge, but that seems unlikely.
This problem persists even after resetting the NTP.conf settings per the article above.
Basically I'm mystified, and even though I'm inclined to fix the root problem, in the meantime I'm losing big chunks of climactic action in the broadcast TV my EyeTV app is recording for us, and I'd like to at least apply a band-aid to keep my recordings on schedule while I continue to pick away at the root problem.
So while the hardware [mobo, battery] might be the ultimate root cause, I'm not ready to toss the box quite yet - it's still otherwise a workhorse.
Can someone explain to me in simple terms what command(s) I should embed in a daily script (to be wired into my crontab or whatever is currently the best task scheduler in Mavericks)? If this was a Windows box I'd run something approximately like "w32tm.exe /resync" or "w32tm.exe /config /update". Can anyone help me come up with an equivalent or appropriate command I should have Mavericks run every day for me? Thanks!
