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I altered the modifying dates on my files. Will my files and updates be safe once I resume the app?
Hello friends. I have a lotof old pictures (some dating back to 1950s) on my computer which are synced with Dropbox. They are close to 1TB. I took the past week modifying the dates in the pictures (c...
Hi Megan!
I used a tool called BulkFileChanger to modify the actual metadata on the files. I will create a backup of the files today. Would you know which date field is used by dropbox to determine which file is newer (eg. date modified or date accessed)? If I have that info, I can use BulkFileChanger to modify that date field to todays date so it will be the newest date.
Thanks!
- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi sohaibh, in general, the Dropbox desktop application would only sync when the file is modified, so it would be using the modification date, and not the accessed date, since this would change constantly if you were to scroll through your images for instance.
However, bear in mind that the modification date itself is what Dropbox would sync and show on the site, so all your files would have today's date. Likewise, if you were to edit the metadata on a single file afterwards, the modification date would change again, and that would then sync to the site.
The simplest solution given your situation is that since modification dates can always change (and Dropbox doesn't track the file creation date itself), you could rename the images in numerical order, similar to how Dropbox does the automatic camera uploads.
For instance, this could be a renamed file in your imageset, 1956-02-25 13.48.02.jpg, and so on. With that, there is no doubt about the 'date' of the image. YYYY-MM-DD HH.MM.SS helps for ascending order in international format (and is compatible with all OSes since there are no : / or | symbols), and filenames will never change unless you do it manually.
With the bulk renaming program, you should be able to automatically rename all your images like this using the metadata and wildcards, so you can easily locate the correct date/time etc in the future.
- Rich
Super User II
Likewise, if you were to edit the metadata on a single file afterwards, the modification date would change again, and that would then sync to the site.
That's not been my experience. Dropbox doesn't look at the dates to compare files and determine which to sync. It looks at the indexed content of the files. Modifying the date and time attributes of a file, without changing the content, has never caused a file to sync and update the timestamp, in my experience.
I just tested this again. I created a new file (a screenshot of this page) and saved it to my Dropbox folder. The file synced to my account with the current date and time. I then used a utility to change the Creation and Modified dates on the local file back to 2020. That change DID NOT sync to Dropbox, and now the same file in two locations has two different dates.
