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Forum Discussion
Downloaded files lose their original creation date
When I download a file from my DropBox it automatically takes the current date as the 'creation' date; ie. it looses its original creation date; this is a very big problem. Is there anything we can do to restore the original dates?
- Hey
The issue is that you are downloading from the website, so, in fact a new file is being made.
If you want to get everything with the original dates you need to download and install Dropbox on to your computer via www.dropbox.com/downloading. That will create a folder on your computer and download everything in your account to it. They will keep the original dates.
- Mark
Super User II
Hey
The issue is that you are downloading from the website, so, in fact a new file is being made.
If you want to get everything with the original dates you need to download and install Dropbox on to your computer via www.dropbox.com/downloading. That will create a folder on your computer and download everything in your account to it. They will keep the original dates.It is not true. Dropbox changes the "Created" date to when the file is fetched from the cloud, also when using locally installed Dropbox-application.
So if you reinstall a computer, reinstall dropbox and synch. Then all your files will suddenly have "Created" date from when you performed the reainstallation of dropbox.
<( This is really sad as it corrups my fileinformation. All my original "Created" dates are gone with the wind.
Using: Windows 10 with Dropbox v63.4.100
I have the same problem. My original creation dates (or "modified" date in dropbox) all changed to the upload date even when using the desktop app. Fortunately I discovered the problem before uploading and locally deleting all of my precious files, but I have forever lost the dates on many files and for now I'm too scared to delete my remaining originals off my hard drive for fear of losing the metadata. Kind of defeats the purpose of having dropbox.
I have the same issue. Even with syncing, all my videos have lost their original creation date. I have stored thousands of photos and videos of my children on my Dropbox. And it saddens me that I'll never know when a particular video was filmed. This is a dealbreaker for me, and I would tell everyone to not use Dropbox for storing memories.
- Yes
