Preserving dates on copied subdirectories

[sbgolob3144]

Dear Folks,
I would appreciate it if you could implement my request.
When I get a new disk drive (a very large one) and I use your product to copy all the files over from the old disk drive, I need to preserve the subdirectory dates, so that they should be the same as on the old drive. I see that it may be difficult to do this, because you allocate all the subdirectories first, and then copy the contents over to them. However, when you are doing this, if YOU WOULD KEEP THE CREATION DATES OF THE SUBDIRECTORIES THE SAME as on the old drive, this would help me out immensely.
I think that it would not be at all that difficult, but it would require some coding. When you are reading the directory names from the old drive, you should carry the "date information" over as well, so that you don't just "blindly allocate" new directories to copy the stuff into, but it also should be THAT THEY HAVE THE CORRECT (OLD) DATES ASSOCIATED WITH THEM.
So when I do a dir/od command (in a DOS window) against the directory, I should not get a whole bunch of directory names at the end, but rather, the subdirectory names should be scattered among the file names in the correct date order. This will help me a lot, to determine (in a huge file with many subdirectories) what was new, and what was not.
Thank you for listening. At least try and make an option to be able to set this, so that I can preserve the subdirectory dates when copying them from one disk to another.
All the best of everything to all of you.
Sincerely, Sam

[Sonik_C]

I know this isn't specifically a FFS solution, but whenever I'm replacing a drive or just copying the whole contents of one, I don't use FFS. Instead, I prefer to copy the directories in the root of the drive using Robocopy with the /DCOPY:T /COPY:DAT switches to preserve all the original file and folder dates/times. I only use FFS after that to mirror sync any changed files to the drive.

It is a lot more work if you have a lot of folders in the root, but I always like to keep my directory timestamps intact. I don't know if it is something that can be implemented in FFS?

I do agree, it would be great if it didn't change the folder dates.

[Plerry]

See here.

[therube]

And here (for Windows users, Nirsoft), viewtopic.php?t=1646&p=12949#p12949.

[Sonik_C]

And here (for Windows users, Nirsoft), viewtopic.php?t=1646&p=12949#p12949.

Awesome! Thanks for this! I didn't even know that program existed, but I'll definitely keep it for future use.

[Plerry]

It seems the Nirsoft approach may fail to provide a solution if your FFS sync excludes files (via the Exclude Filter) that are more recent or have a more recent modification date than files that are included.

[logon]

My 1st post here: hello everyone.

I just tried FFS and I really like it.

Immediately I looked for the option to preserve files and folders timestamp...

Not finding it, I looked for informations and realized that there is no way to obtain that feature inside the program itself.

I also liked the finding related to NirSoft FolderTimeUpdate utility, but I found it just insufficient for a full purpose IMNSHO.

Since I've been using Attribute Changer https://www.petges.lu/ for years with great satisfaction (just discovered that I'm still using version 8.70...) then I thought I'd share it here because as said I really liked FFS.

Thanks for the great program.

Cheers!

[Lister]

Thanks to those who have suggested workarounds, I will try these.

Just wanted to add my vote for preservation of folder dates to be added to FreeFileSync. Definitely my number one feature request. I have been using FreeFileSync for a number of years now and its really great, so a big thanks to the developers for the awesome work. But the strange thing is I am sure that it used to keep the folder dates, up until a few releases ago? Maybe it was an underlying OS change that took that away?

[maettu_this]

Another vote for this feature request.

[xCSxXenon]

As long as FFS uses the basic file manipulation, it won't be possible.

viewtopic.php?t=6123