compressasm loses access time?

We're backing up to disk (adv_file), using Networker 7.2 from Linux servers (all RHEL3), and to save disk space on the storage node, I've added the compressasm directive.
That works really well, leading to a signicant saving in disk space.
But there's a problem. Every file's access time is now being updated, and that's a big problem for us because we have an archive process that relies on access time.
The answer would apparently be "use atimeasm", but it's not so simple. My first attempt at this was to simply select "UNIX with compression directives" on the clients in question. That directive includes:

<< / >>
skip: tmp_mnt
+skip: core
+atimeasm: .
+compressasm: .

It looks like it should all be ok, but I found we were not getting any compression. Investigating this, I found documented somewhere (a tech bulletin?) that you can't have multiple asm's in the same directory with the same pattern; the first masks the second, which is what seems to have happened here. This seems to be a bug, given that the "Unix with compression" directive that comes with NW 7.2 doesn't actually compress...

To overcome this, I created a "/.nsr" file on each client, containing just "+compressasm: .". That worked, in that backups were now much smaller, but we I noticed that we'd lost all our access times when our archive process failed.

So maybe the /.nsr directive was causing the global directive to stop working, so I moved the .nsr file down into the filesystem with the big files we wanted to compress (/lv1).

Now we have access times being preserved on files in directories like /bin or /usr, so the global directive is applying, but access times are not being preserved in /lv1 where we have the compressasm directive in place (but they are being compressed).

I have to conclude that compressasm does not preserve access time, despite atimeasm being used.

Can anyone confirm this?

[Sorry for the long ramble, but I want to avoid anyone suggesting anything I've already tried]


Regards,
David Meiklejohn