title: How to manually change linux system time?
body: <p>I have Mint Linux running in a VM.</p>
  
  <p>I tried through the GUI to set the date to an earlier date so I could try to mimic a database issue that occurred on production on that date.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to use the date command.</p>
  
  <p>Both times, within a few seconds the date is changed back to today.</p>
  
  <p>I stopping auto time synchronisation - the output from <code>timedatectl status</code> is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    Local time: Mon 2016-04-18 15:41:19 BST
    Universal time: Mon 2016-04-18 14:41:19 UTC
          Timezone: Europe/London (BST, +0100)
       NTP enabled: no
  NTP synchronized: no
   RTC in local TZ: no
        DST active: yes
   Last DST change: DST began at
                    Sun 2016-03-27 00:59:59 GMT
                    Sun 2016-03-27 02:00:00 BST
   Next DST change: DST ends (the clock jumps one hour backwards) at
                    Sun 2016-10-30 01:59:59 BST
                    Sun 2016-10-30 01:00:00 GMT
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>hwclock --set --date="2016-04-13 16:45:05"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Nothing works, the clock just keeps going back to today.</p>