Why does my creation date disappear.

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Why does my creation date disappear.

Postby DrewSpangler » Sun Aug 09, 2009 3:22 am

I am doing much research on a novel. When I complete research and save it to my lap-top it will eventually have a creation date and a last time modified. When I transfer the doc to a thumb drive (in case my computer goes dark) the original opening date disappears! I am sure this is some kind of protection but it’s destroying my work records. All my work looks stolen.

My Question: How can I have an opening & closing date without working right
out of the thumb drive. I only put stuff on the thumb drive when I’m finished. The original ends up in the garbage! And! There goes my original opening date! I keep my thumb drive in a safe so it will be protected for sure when I am gone. I do not want to work directly out of my thumb drive (run back and fourth from the safe).

PS I down load to read only CD’s every 4 to 6 weeks. This gives me a fixed date
that my work existed at the time of the burn (still a opening date). HOW does
a writer prove he has authored his creation if he can’t prove an opening date?

Last Question: Am I not suppose to respond to an answer? Can I not say thank you? Is this to much back and fourth stuff?

Thanks Drew
DrewSpangler
 
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Re: Why does my creation date disappear.

Postby Barry » Mon Aug 10, 2009 3:38 am

DrewSpangler wrote:I am doing much research on a novel. When I complete research and save it to my lap-top it will eventually have a creation date and a last time modified. When I transfer the doc to a thumb drive (in case my computer goes dark) the original opening date disappears! I am sure this is some kind of protection but it’s destroying my work records. All my work looks stolen.

My Question: How can I have an opening & closing date without working right
out of the thumb drive. I only put stuff on the thumb drive when I’m finished. The original ends up in the garbage! And! There goes my original opening date! I keep my thumb drive in a safe so it will be protected for sure when I am gone. I do not want to work directly out of my thumb drive (run back and fourth from the safe).


Hi Drew,
I just now transfered a couple of old AppleWorks files to a thumb drive to confirm what you've said, and yes, the creation dates for both files disappeared.

The probable cause (and I am doing a bit of guessing here) is that both of us either through negligence or design did not reformat the drive before storing files on it. That would mean that the drive is still formatted as a Windows drive. The Mac can read from and can write to a Windows formatted drive, but the format itself does not recognize the Mac's two-fork file structure. If the creation date is stored in the file's resource fork (and I suspect that's the case), that date (and anything else in the resource fork will disappear when the file is saved on Windows formatted media.

You might try archiving the file as a zip file or a disk image file before transferring it to the thumb drive. I'll take a look at that process and get back to you tomorrow.

PS I down load to read only CD’s every 4 to 6 weeks. This gives me a fixed date
that my work existed at the time of the burn (still a opening date). HOW does
a writer prove he has authored his creation if he can’t prove an opening date?

Last Question: Am I not suppose to respond to an answer? Can I not say thank you? Is this to much back and fourth stuff?

Thanks Drew


Some applications themselves will track changes to files. AppleWorks is not one of these, but I think Pages supports the feature. Again, I'll check this tomorrow.

Responses to answers are fine (and necessary if you need further information), and Thank yous are always appreciated.

Regards,
Barry
Barry
 
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Joined: Mon Sep 30, 2002 12:54 am
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Re: Why does my creation date disappear.

Postby Barry » Mon Aug 10, 2009 5:57 pm

DrewSpangler wrote:How can I have an opening & closing date without working right out of the thumb drive. I only put stuff on the thumb drive when I’m finished. The original ends up in the garbage! ...

PS I down load to read only CD’s every 4 to 6 weeks. This gives me a fixed date
that my work existed at the time of the burn (still a opening date). HOW does
a writer prove he has authored his creation if he can’t prove an opening date?


Did a little more testing today. It looks like the Thumb Drive, formatted for Windows, is the problem. But there is an easy workaround.

When you finish working on the file, save it on your Mac, close the document, then go to the Finder, select the file, go File > Create Archive. You'll get a .zip file, which you can safely transfer to the thumb drive. You can zip a single file (xyz.cwk will become xyz.cwk.zip) or a group of files (the group will become a single zip file named archive.zip; you can—and should—change the "archive" part of the file name to reflect what's in the archive).

To expand the archive, first copy it to a Mac formatted drive, then double click it. The archive will expand into a folder containing the files with their creation dates preserved. If expanded while on a Windows formatted drive, the expanded file(s) will lose their creation dates (but those dates will still be preserved in the archive, which can be expanded after copying to a Mac disk).


The archives can also be burned to a CD. Again, because the zip expander places the files into the same folder as the archive, the zip archive will have to be copied to a writeable Mac disk before expanding.

Regards,
Barry

PS: Pages does track changes, but does not, judging from a quick read of the User Guide, track the dates on which changes were made.
B
Barry
 
Posts: 1390
Joined: Mon Sep 30, 2002 12:54 am
Location: 48°50' N 123° 30'W


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