Coping files changes creation date (dolphin)

General system Applications
1

Hi, I take a lot of photos and try to back they up regularly, by coping them to hard drive. Now I have tons of them with “modification date” in 2023 and “creation date” in 2025… I can sort by modification date to get them in correct order, but that isn’t possible once I copy them back to my phone.

Is there any way to copy files in dolphin without loosing creation date, and/or to change “creation date” to last “modified date” in multiple files?

I’ve looked for this topic, it’s possible that I’ve missed it because of my dyslexia and/or I’m using wrong terms too look for it. I’m still pretty new to this.

2

A copy of a file is a new file so it will normally have a new creation date. rsync and friends have flags to preserve creation time.

Maybe create a service menu that does a special copy to preserve the timestamps?

Also, welcome to the forum!

1 Like
3

while cp can preserve many file attributes, it does not support preserving the creation date directly. For this, you may need to explore alternative methods or tools depending on your filesystem and requirements.

To copy files while attempting to retain the creation date, consider using rsync with the --crtime option, if supported by your system. However, this may not work on all systems.

Use the rsync --crtime option with caution. Experiment on a very small scale and have backups of the backups you experiment with.

Pudge

4

I will look into it in the future, but is there any way to fix the files I already copied?

5

Thank you, I will try doing that in the future, but it’s kin of hard to keep backups when crating them makes it worse :sweat_smile:.
Do you know of any way to fix the files I already copied?

6

It would probably easiest to recopy them maintaining the timestamps. If you don’t have the original data anymore there is nothing to tell you what the original create timestamps were.

In general, using dolphin isn’t the best way to make backups. There are a ton of tools available to help with making backups. BackInTime, kopia, borg/vorta, restic, etc, etc.