Preserving the dates on folders (and files) when copying from a network share

[SlickRCBD]

A while ago I backed up my Win98SE computer's hard drive to a virtual
machine virutal disk drive. When I tried to copy everything back, the
dates on the various folders were not preserved no matter what I did.
Nor were the file dates preserved.

Now that Windows is up and running after swapping hard drives, I'm
trying to restore some files where dates were significant. It seems
when I copy a file by itself or in groups of FILES, the dates are
preserved, but if I include a folder the date modified gets set to the
current date. How do I copy the folders so the modification dates are
preserved? I tried to recall how to use the ms-dos style restore
command, but restore /? yielded "bad command or filename" indicating
it wasn't available, and Microsoft Backup only seems to work with
their own backup files.

The files I want are stored on a virtual hard drive, and I can share
them with either a virtual windows 98SE (cloned from the real computer
I'm trying to restore them to, I just boot the backup partition) or a
Virtual Windows XP Professional computer.
Even if I could access them from the host Vista 64 OS, trying to
access a Vista share will make a Windows 98SE computer crash, either
virtual or real.

[Jeff Richards]

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)

Post by SlickRCBD
A while ago I backed up my Win98SE computer's hard drive to a virtual
machine virutal disk drive. When I tried to copy everything back, the
dates on the various folders were not preserved no matter what I did.
Nor were the file dates preserved.
Now that Windows is up and running after swapping hard drives, I'm
trying to restore some files where dates were significant. It seems
when I copy a file by itself or in groups of FILES, the dates are
preserved, but if I include a folder the date modified gets set to the
current date. How do I copy the folders so the modification dates are
preserved? I tried to recall how to use the ms-dos style restore
command, but restore /? yielded "bad command or filename" indicating
it wasn't available, and Microsoft Backup only seems to work with
their own backup files.
The files I want are stored on a virtual hard drive, and I can share
them with either a virtual windows 98SE (cloned from the real computer
I'm trying to restore them to, I just boot the backup partition) or a
Virtual Windows XP Professional computer.
Even if I could access them from the host Vista 64 OS, trying to
access a Vista share will make a Windows 98SE computer crash, either
virtual or real.

[SlickRCBD]

Post by Jeff Richards
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

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.

[Jeff Richards]

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)

Post by Jeff Richards
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

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.

[SlickRCBD]

Post by Jeff Richards
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

On my even older Macintosh, (Mac OS 8.6) folders decompress from
Stuffit, ZIP, and early RAR archives.
It wouldn't be that difficult to back up the things I've changed in
the last month on the Win98 computer and restore from a disk image,
but I do not own a copy of Ghost, the only imaging program I'm
familiar with for Windows.
Are there any free imaging programs I can use to make an image of the
Virutal PC hard drive image and copy it from my Vista 64 Home Premium
computer to my Windows 98SE computer via a Fast Ethernet connection?

Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever tried Microsoft Backup to
do a restore. Will using Microsoft Backup on the virutal machine allow
me to use the output file on the real one?