Date Created (5.1 SP2)

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In one folder on our network there are numerous files that have a Date Created that is much later (by several years in some cases) than the Date Modified, furthermore the Date Created is the same (down to the minute) for almost all the files. Is it possible that this has been caused by the files being restored at the time now given as Date Created?, and if so why has the Date Modified been left at, presumably, its old value whilst the Date Created has been altered? Is it possible to find out the true Date Created? There are many types of files involved, .xls, .doc, .pdf, .sql ….

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Welcome to the bizarre world of Microsoft timestamping!

I would advise you to read this, which (heavitly summarised!) indicates that only the Date Modified information is worth the hard disk space it’s written on…

John

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Thank you John.

Seems like Microsoft doing what it does best.

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>I would advise you to read this,
John, I’m recommending this post for an automatic once-a-year item (grin!)
post 465,460, post 422,614, post 332,455
I had lost the original post, and searched The Forum by your link reference.

Not only is date created/accessed useless, it functions not at all in Explorer when trying to sort by created/accessed:

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I don’t remember the annual nature of the discussion so I can’t “get into” it with you, but you have a mix of folders and files in your highlighted example. Aren’t folders and files sorted separately? If you check what you blocked off, it does seem that the folders and then the files are sorted in ascending sequence.

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>If you check what you blocked off, it does seem that the folders and then the files are sorted in ascending sequence.
Al, you are absolutely right.
(I just reran my test on several other folders using Created/Accessed)
I was so focussed on my needs to determine how many files were in the given date range that my eyes didn’t stray across to the left-hand side.

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> I would advise you to read this,
I re-read it and then conducted an informal test (attached) of my own. Under WinXP/SP2 it doesn’t seem quite as gloomy as under Win95 (The article is dated 2000-06-07).
My interest was piqued by the possibility of the programmer of a custom system – such as the Document Management System I’m working on – to set the Accessed Date and Time correctly.

My Word/VBA code intercepts save and save/as events. I have another application (MRUse) which intercepts Open events. I could update the Date/TIME Accessed each time a user within our system opened, saved, saveAsd or closed a document. I could effect the same whenever our system moved or copied a file. To move a file, the program code always tries to NAME, and if that fails, issues a COPY/Kill.
It would be interesting to see what happens under VISTA/Office2007.

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