You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Does Dropbox keep the original modification date?
Does Dropbox maintain the original file modified date when a file is uploaded? If so, how do you see it?
If you're uploading to the site directly on the browser, then yes, you'll have today's date.
If you're moving the files into a Dropbox folder on your machine, then the OS should keep the original dates, and those are the dates that will appear on the Dropbox site when they sync up.
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi agundlach, thanks for messaging the Community!
This depends on how you sync the file to your account, and how the file is edited or saved. Generally, if a file in the Dropbox folder, and is then edited and saved, the modification date of the file would change to the current time.
Uploading any file from your machine to the Dropbox site would make the modification date to be that moment, even if the file was created on a different date.
You should be able to see the original creation date of the file according to Dropbox in the version history of the file itself.
If you need any more info, please let me know.
Thank you, Jay! I am planning to upload several years' worth of files to Dropbox to store as an archive. Does this mean that the "modified date" of each file will be the date of upload, and I will lose all of the historical dates of my files last edits?
- Jay
If you're uploading to the site directly on the browser, then yes, you'll have today's date.
If you're moving the files into a Dropbox folder on your machine, then the OS should keep the original dates, and those are the dates that will appear on the Dropbox site when they sync up.
Since the recent system upgrade (August 2022), the dates do not change to the uploaded dates, when using a browser. This is a big problem for us, we need to track the dates we post files vs. when they were created. Any ideas? So far the Dropbox support has not been at all helpful.
