Two Dropbox folders after migration from old Mac to new

I am wondering if it would be simpler to switch my preference to "available off-line" to make the folder modification dates reflect the original reality instead of everything being September 24? I'm making a back up of the dropbox folder contents and will probably give this a try.

By the way, I realize by making a copy to an external drive all the cloud files have to populate locally in order to be copied and I'm wondering if they will remain local once the completes.

Keep in mind the instructions you gave me for the test omitted a step I had to take, which was to quarantine the cloud only folders with the bad dates before copying from the off-line dropbox folder so there would be no overwriting happening. If I repeat the test we did it would be incremental and pretty time-consuming.

You can definitely try this as a test, before following the previous steps. 

Now, if you make your files available offline, they should remain as such even after they’ve been copied to your external hard drive (given that you also have enough space on your local hard drive).

I've had a degree of success, pausing DropBox sync on my two MacBooks removing folders that were imprinted with false modified dates by DropBox replacing them with folders from the duplicate dropbox folder that was off-line that had correct modified dates (named DropBox personal) and the correct dates seem to stick.

This shows some promise, but I feel at every turn I'm being undermined by DropBox imposing new ‘last modified’ dates on its own on folders that were not part of this replacement-fix experiment.  By this I mean when I sort by date-modified, I see that dozens of folders I have not used in months have been given recently modified dates (post that 9/24 migration date). This is really a nightmare what is going on? This never used to happen on the old MacBook. Being able to sort by last modified date is so fundamental to my workflow and at every turn, it seems like DropBox is undoing the correct modified dates and updating it with a more recent date despite the *complete lack of activity on said folder.*

I don't know if this has any bearing, but since the new MacBook has more storage, I've opted to enable the preference "available off-line" thinking that would help the situation of files behaving like normal local files and simply getting mirrored to the cloud and other devices.

Even though files are getting populated to my old MacBook, there are issues there related to modify dates, but I'll save that for another time as what I've described above is really the central and fundamental problem. Thanks in advance for any help.

Paul

Sure would like some help with this, Nancy are you there?

Hi Paul D.4, currently, there aren't any further steps we can try in relation to the modification dates for folders on your device. 

In general, folders do not contain modification dates, as they are only directories containing files, and no actual data in the 'folder item' itself. The OS would be the one to determine when a folder is considered to be 'modified'. 

This behavior can be duplicated when moving files to or from an external drive, like in this Apple Support thread. There are many other threads on that site that indicate similar issues with the modification date of folders, or other random behavior, however, files tend to keep their correct dates.

Jay this behavior is new to me, I had such a positive experience for years where DropBox contents retained the folder modification dates as reflected in the Finder and not munged by DropBox.

I've posted this problem earlier, but the backstory related to a MacBook migration is besides the point at this juncture. Contrary to my experience with dropBox on my older MacBook, which faithfully retained valid modification dates, DropBox on my new MacBook bulk-changes folder modification dates, despite the lack of *any activity* or true modification of their contents. See the attached finder list where folders are having their mod dates changed en masse even though there's *no* activity. I wish I could understand this new behavior which really upends the way I work with DropBox contents - sorting by date and seeing instantly what I've been working on recently. This seems so fundamental and counterproductive, I'm hoping there is a fix at hand. Thanks in advance for any help.

Paul  [IMAGE LINK IS BROKEN AND CANNOT BE DISPLAYED]. 

 I'm stumped on how to post an image I supplied a valid directory path to the image but clearly that's not doing the job

Maybe you'd like to try another browser then, Paul?

Hi Walter, I can't tell if you're suggestion applies to the failed image post or the DropBox problem I'm describing. The screen grab is a little secondary in so far as one sees say two dozen folders with the same recent date, even though there's been no activity within them. As to the central problem, I'm not using a web browser, but rather wanting the dropbox folder in my Mac primary user directory that is simply mirrored to other devices and not influx or churning in the cloud. The way it used to work for me is I thought I had everything saved locally and box folder contents simply mirrored to other devices, this was a very happy state of affairs I'd like to reinstate.