Solved "Date modified?"

[Nick]

I don't really know where to put this so I'm just gonna put it in Windows 7...
In October of 2015, I built us a new home computer which we had to transfer all of our old files from the old home computer to. One we did that, I noticed that if you go into the properties of pretty much any item, it'll show the day you transferred it at the date it was created, but the day that you actually created it as the date you modified it... When it says created, is it just talking about the day it was first present on the new hard drive or something? Because when you create a brand new file from the new computer, it shows the date that the document was created as "date created" and the last time you edited it/saved it as the "date modified." Silly question, I know, but these are just the random things I wonder. I have a slight irrational fear that some computer someday is gonna mess all that up and start putting random dates in random places, which would get annoying for me...

 

[Rustys]

See if this helps to explain it.

How can the Date Created be later than the date modified?

No, that is not necessarily incorrect, your point of view may sound logical but consider that the copied file is in fact a newly created file and using the method you describe may cause other problems.

When you copy a file you copy it to a new location, a different folder (obviously you cannot copy the same file to its same location). The copied file is indeed a newly created file in its new location, you now have two identical files in two different location, the copied file is a new file and it was created when you copied it, not when it was originally created in the source directory.

Consider the following scenario: You copy files from one folder to another, and then again from the second folder to yet another different folder and so on. At one time you do a cleanup and want to get rid of duplicate files, where is the original source file? With all your files having the same creation date you now don't know the origin of the file... now wouldn't that be annoying? Can you see that at certain times this could cause confusion, headaches or other problems?

If you want to keep the creation date you have to move the file to its new location, then there will still only be one file on the computer and it will keep its creation date. A move is in fact a rename, the file doesn't really move on the disk, its name is simply changed to reflect the new path, the path is a component of the filename.

Of course, as you pointed out, all things Microsoft are not always so simple or logical and perfect. If you move the file to a different volume then a new file is in fact created on the new volume and the new file gets a new creation date, the disk space occupied by the original file on the source volume is then marked as free and available for write operations, to the operating system the file is no longer on the source volume and the one on the target volume is a new one.

If you want to preserve the original file timestamp then you can use other copy utilities like xxcopy or the newer Robocopy. You can also zip them then extract them to the new location.