Force date/time/clock sync

Question

My Snow Leopard macbook is set to Set date and time automatically: Apple Americas/U.S. (time.apple.com), but despite sitting idle for several hours (with internet connection), it has yet to do any syncing, the date remains off by ~2 days.

Solution 1

From terminal:

sudo ntpdate -u time.apple.com

macOS Catalina:

sudo sntp -sS pool.ntp.org

Solution 2

Per the ntpdate man page, the accepted answer will become obsolete when ntpdate is retired. If you encounter this problem, this will do the equivalent:

sudo ntpd -q 

ntpd : ...sets and maintains the system time of day in syn- chronism with Internet standard time servers.

-q : Set the time and quit.

Sources:

• http://www.manpages.info/macosx/ntpdate.8.html
• http://www.manpages.info/macosx/ntpd.8.html

Solution 3

I ran these two commands on Mojave:

sudo systemsetup -setnetworktimeserver pool.ntp.org
sudo sntp -sS pool.ntp.org

Following https://superuser.com/a/1479345 following two answers on https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/117864

Solution 4

The currently accepted answer does NOT work in Mojave, as ntpdate and co have been removed.

See this excellent answer on the Apple StackExchange for up-to-date instructions.

Solution 5

you can go into the system preferences and reset the time manualy, and then set the time to sync automaticly again once you are back up to speed with whatever day/week/month you need. i am not sure why its not syncing with apple, but you can just set the day properly and it will be accurate as long as you dont cross too many time zones.

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Comments

[mindless.panda]

Try toggling it on and off to force a refresh.

[mindless.panda]

How about trace routing time.apple.com and then trying a different ntp client against that server?

[haimg]

Many time sync utilities have safeguards, where they won't sync if the time difference is too large, to prevent disasters if, for example, time server is compromised, etc. So, set the time roughly right manually, then it should sync by itself.

[Dawngerpony]

Seems to work fine in El Capitan too.

[Nick]

Still working in macOS Sierra.

[khadafi]

Confirmed working in High Sierra as well.

[yiwei]

Confirmed still working in HS.

[Alex Ryan]

Confirmed NOT working in Mojave, as ntpdate and co have been removed. See this excellent answer for up-to-date instructions.

[DavidPostill]

Please quote the essential parts of the answer from the reference link(s), as the answer can become invalid if the linked page(s) change.

[Alex Ryan]

The linked answer is more likely to be updated with new helpful information than it is to disappear. Links were invented precisely so that we don't have to copy-paste information everywhere it's used. Unnecessary denormalization is bad! 🙂

[DavidPostill]

Unfortunately that's not what we do here. We are not Wikipedia. A class example is Microsoft who broke huge numbers of links and deleted the content. Please follow the Stack Exchange conventions as instructed. Please read Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer? - Meta Stack Exchange

[Elad Nava]

This was the only command that worked in High Sierra for me.