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Old October 21st 09, 06:53 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.disks.general
Jeff Richards
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 1,526
Default Preserving the dates on folders (and files) when copying from a network share

It's not a Windows issue. The copy procedure will use a Windows procedure
to create the folders it needs. The create folder process in W98 does not
have any options for creating it as at a particular date, so it will get the
current date. Files, OTOH, are copied, not created, so their date comes with
them.

If you use a copy procedure that copies folders instead of creating them
then there would not be a problem. This is what disk imaging programs do -
they just mindlessly copy the bits and don't concern themselves with the
file system. You can't do that for a copy into an existing file system, of
course. The copy procedure would have to use Windows to create the folder
then update the folder details as appropriate. That's what copy functions
in more advanced file systems do, because there are many folder settings
other than the date that need to be restored.

I am not aware of a copy procedure that will copy folder settings for a file
system other than NTFS, but, as you state, I would have expected that a
restore from archive might have done what you need. Perhaps you should
investigate other archiving utilities, especially newer ones created when
folder properties had become relevant, to see if any have options regarding
restoring folder settings. It's not a technically difficult thing to do,
it's just the the OS won't do it for you if you create, rather than copy, a
folder..
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"SlickRCBD" wrote in message
...
On Oct 19, 12:53 am, "Jeff Richards" wrote:
What copy procedures have you used?

Restore will not work, as that is a different procedure.

As a last resort, it would be possible to copy back and let the copy
create
the folders, then use a Touch utility to fix the folder dates.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)"SlickRCBD" wrote
in message

Whatever it is has to be automated, as among other things I was trying
to restore my saved games for things like Baldur's Gate I/II where the
dates affect the order the saved games appear, and by their nature
they tend to be in order. I don't want to manually have to do over a
hundred folders.

I initially used XCOPY for everything. Then once I got Windows98
working on the new drive and noticed the problem, I tried the normal
procedure of dragging from the network share to the folder they
belonged.
Next, I tried select all, copy, paste
Then I got the idea to stick them in a solid WinRAR archive and
decompress them to a folder. I figured I could just overwrite the ones
with the bad dates. Even that didn't work, which surprised me.

Give that there are "freshen" and other options in winRAR, I'd expect
that to have worked.

So, how do I preserve the dates on the folders? Some registry entry I
need to change? I don't see anything in TweakUI.