My files are loosing the Created (date-hour) info !

[andre-w]

Hello,

I have been transferring my digital pictures from a PC (Windows XP) to a Mac (OS X 10.4), using a USB flash drive, and I notice my JPG files lost the "created" date-hour information, but the "modified" information is OK.

I did some tests copying other file formats (besides JPEG) from the PC, and the created info is also lost. I checked the files on the source (PC) and they are all right.

Why am I loosing this piece of information? Is there any way to keep that while copying? If not, is there any way to restore or set the "created" date?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Andre W.

 

[andre-w]

Hello,

I did check my flash drive and realized my files were loosing their "Created" info the moment I was copying them to my USB flash drive. My flash drive was formated as FAT16 but even after formating as FAT32 it behaves the same.

In another approach, I did successfully transfer my files through network without loosing any information, it takes much longer than using the USB drive though. As they say, it is easier to network one Mac and one PC than two PCs together.

Yet, I am still intrigued on how to fix "Created" and "Modified" info. If someone is aware of any Mac OS X application or Unix command line concerning repairing file dates, please let me know.

And ultimately, is there any format for a USB flash drive, that would not loose any information? I am planing to use my flash drive with Mac OS, Linux and Windows.

Best regards,

Andre W.

 

[perfessor101]

And ultimately, is there any format for a USB flash drive, that would not loose any information? I am planing to use my flash drive with Mac OS, Linux and Windows.

If you want to both read and write to the Flash drive from all three platforms, the only formats available to you are FAT16 and FAT32 (in Mac terminology FAT32 is called MS-DOS). And yes you will lose some file information between the three platforms simply because FAT32 is a relatively ancient disk format that does not comprehend Mac meta data, has no clue about Unix (Linux and OS X) file ownership and permissions, and has file naming conventions peculiar to MS-DOS and windows and different from those of Unix based systems. The same is true of FAT16 except the file naming conventions are even more restrictive than FAT32. I don't know about Linux, but OS X can only read NTFS but not write to it and many of the FAT32 limitations are also true in NTFS. Neither Windows/DOS or Linux can read or write to Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volumes.