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Backup - do not change timestamp of destination directory

Posted: 26 Nov 2018 21:35
by prino
Can you please (try to) change the backup command to not change the timestamp(s) of the destination directory?

Reason: Comparing two multi-Tb backup disks for equality is not something you want to do by an exhaustive recursive file-by-file compare, it's much easier, be it obviously not 100% fool-proof, to do a "dir [thisdrive] /ogn /s > dir-[thisdrive].txt" change "mydrive:" in both files to "Q:" and use a simple compare of the two text files. Sadly, backup (and obviously even just copy) change the timestamp of the destination directory, making this comparison a bit harder than it could/should be.

Re: Backup - do not change timestamp of destination directory

Posted: 26 Nov 2018 22:09
by highend
Sorry but this isn't so much about these commands but about Windows. The parent folders last modified date gets changed when content (first level) is updated in it. So just read the date of the source folder before doing the backupto... and set the timestamp of the destination folder once the backupto has finished to the previously stored date

Re: Backup - do not change timestamp of destination directory

Posted: 26 Nov 2018 22:18
by prino
Of course it's effing Windoze that's the problem, but it would be nice, even if only as a tweak, if XY could stop this from happening!

Re: Backup - do not change timestamp of destination directory

Posted: 26 Nov 2018 22:38
by highend
You can't just stop that from happening on demand, it's an NTFS "feature". You can turn the behavior off if you want (requires a restart)...
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

Re: Backup - do not change timestamp of destination directory

Posted: 26 Nov 2018 23:49
by prino
That's already done ever since I used XP. Still happens, the modified date and last accessed date are both changed, and it's the former that shows up in directories. XY's backup can and does already set all dates to those of the original files. How hard would it be to "remember" dates of directories it copies data to, and reset them after the backup operation?