"Date Modified" changes on original file when copying

[crashnbuen]

I'd always wanted to be able to MOVE files & folders between different HDDs and Partitions without the C & M dates changing. It's crucial for me to have those dates for HISTORICAL tracking / REMEMBERING purpose.

Use ROBOCOPY for that

Actually, I use a combination of TeraCopy and RichCopy (runs Robocopy in the back) as both miss certain things but I do a 2 or 3 step layering and Folders and Files are 99% cloned with C & M dates:
RC > TC > RC

 

[TeKola]

Modified Date changes by just viewing a file

Windows 7 changes the modified date on a file if you just open it to view it.
This has very bad results since we search for files by when they were last "Modified"
I opened a file in Excel and its modified date changes to today even though no modifications are made.
This is a travesty of a moronic operating system.

 

[logicearth]

Windows 7 changes the modified date on a file if you just open it to view it.
This has very bad results since we search for files by when they were last "Modified"
I opened a file in Excel and its modified date changes to today even though no modifications are made.
This is a travesty of a moronic operating system.

That is an application problem, not an operating system problem. And the application could be modifying in the background, hard to say, unless you do a hash compare.

 

[LMiller7]

Windows does NOT change the modified time when the file is merely read. This is confirmed by observation. I will not comment on what Excel might be doing. The access time would change in this case, if it was being updated. But for performance reasons Vista and later does not update access datestamps. Again, confirmed by observation.

 

[Zoandar]

To add to this discussion, the reason I am here is that I am seeking a way to prevent the "Date Modified" data from changing on a FOLDER when several of its files are deleted.

This might seem strange, but the reasoning has to do with how I have been working for years to create custom photorealistic scenery for my MS Flight Simulator X setup. Each state has dozens of files which I have uniquely named by either a proximity to a town, lake, river, etc. Since I obviously don't know the entire geographical names and layout of every tiny landmark across the country, the ONLY way I can keep track of where to find these files in my backups is by the creation DATE and TIME, so I can correlate them with a log I keep.

Once I have the folder in place in FSX and have made a backup to bluray, I delete the dozen files used to build that segment (amounting to multiple GB of files) from that folder on the SSD running FSX. It only needs the final scenery BGL file I had generated to use. I do this to preserve space on the SSD. But once I "clean house" on a folder of a single scenery segment, Win7 changes its date, throwing it's chronological location in my project out the window. So I have been manually re-setting the Modified Date on every folder, but that is a pain to do. I'd like to find a file utility that will let me delete files in a folder without modifying the folder's "modified date".

Does anyone know of a utility that can do that?

 

[periboob]

Not exactly what you are asking for, but a workaround. A nice set of utilities from StahlWorks Technologies - Software Tools For Professionals is SFK (swiss file knife), a command line utility that includes "touch". So using a command line like

sfk touch -date 20140101010000 "new folder"

lets you reset the date on your folder to what ever you want.

 

[Zoandar]

Not exactly what you are asking for, but a workaround. A nice set of utilities from StahlWorks Technologies - Software Tools For Professionals is SFK (swiss file knife), a command line utility that includes "touch". So using a command line like

sfk touch -date 20140101010000 "new folder"

lets you reset the date on your folder to what ever you want.

Thanks, but I have been using Attribute Changer to change the dates individually like that, after I access each folder. However, I'd like not to have to do that. I'd like to tell Windows not to change the "modified" date at all.

 

[TheAncient]

I am currently facing a problem that appears to be related to this thread. In my case though, SOME (not all) files, upon copy, do not retain their original modified and last saved dates.

I have been trying to create an EXACT copy of a directory and the hierarchy below it. The problem is, that in some cases the date modified and date last saved are changed to the current date.
When, using FreeFileSync, I attempt to verify that the copy is indeed exact, multiple files are listed where the modified and last saved dates have changed from the original dates to the current dates. If I actually synchronize the files using either the "mirror" or the "update" functions of FreeFileSync, the modified and last saved dates will still differ from the dates on the original files. Thus, I can synchronize as often as I want but I will still end up with files where the dates/times differ from the original.
I understand some utilities can - supposedly - overcome this shortfall of the Windows operating system: Xcopy, Robocopy, XXCopy all claim to be able to retain the original dates. Their command syntax has specific switches to accomplish just that but, while this works for SOME files, it does not work for others. I have attached a screen shot showing the details for one of those problem files in both, the Source directory (the directory I am copying FROM) and in a directory created using XXCopy using the switches /TCA /TCC /TCW (I tried /Backup as well with the same results). All other files visible in the screen shot have retained their original dates.
I would appreciate any insights WHY this is happening for some files but not for others and any ideas how I can overcome this problem and end up with an exact copy of my directory structure.
(OS is Win7-64, Source and Destination drives are both local. The account used for the copy operations is an Administrator account.)