Share via

How do I prevent the date of my folder from changing when I am copying to an external drive.

Anonymous
2024-07-26T10:28:58+00:00

Hello. The word Copy means "An imitation or reproduction of an original; a duplicate". An imitation or reproduction of an original; a duplicate. From a records point of view, you're killing me....This is cracra that the Date Modified date or folder date as we lay people call it, changes when copying to an external drive. Please don't say you are modifying the date when copying to a new drive...not acceptable. One should be able to copy without changes of any sort. Like copying an individual file, the file date does not change nor should it but for some reason, the folder does...please work your geek magic and use the same coding used for individual files and apply to date modified aka Folder dates when copying please. - - If you feel the need to change the 'Date Modified' date when copying folders, then create another column when something is copied and call it Original Folder Date and do not change the folder date when copied...KEEP the actual date that is present on the folder one is copying (not modifying) and please, do not mess with individual file dates.

Thank you for your assistance in solving this should be easy problem if we think about the definition of copy and our end-users. eh? Please, do not say download another program to do this...MS surely has the brain power to make this happen in one of their updates. This should be a retrofit to Windows 10 users who find Windows 11 to be unmanageable behemoth program that slows our productivity down... Thank you for fixing this real-life business problem that needlessly costs time and therefore, money.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Files, folders, and storage

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

3 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Les Ferch 10,326 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-09-26T14:11:50+00:00

    This is one of those things that's tied to how the file system works. It's worked that way for decades, so it's extremely unlikely Microsoft would risk breaking something by changing the behavior.

    When a copy is made to a new volume, those are newly created folders and files on that volume, so, from a forensics point of view, the "Date created" tells us those folders and files were just created on that volume. If those dates were "preserved" from the source, we would actually lose some forensic data. Note that "Date created" represents when a file is first copied to (or first saved to) a given volume, not when the content was first created.

    The folder's "Date modified" property also changes to the current date and time because that date always reflects if anything at all changed within the folder. In this case, that change would be the values for "Date created" of all the items within the folder. So, yes, it's not entirely intuitive, but it is what it is.

    However, you can use other tools, such as TeraCopy that will "preserve" all of the dates. The created dates (and modified dates for folders) are initially set to the current date and time of the copy by the file system, but the tool then immediately reads the old dates and resets them on the target to match the source.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2024-09-25T16:18:31+00:00

    In a court of law, you lose the integrity of the file, if anything is altered.

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2024-07-26T16:38:30+00:00

    Copy means just that but the data file date is something else

    0 comments