Windows 7 - date file moved to folder

Ant555

Does anyone know of any way to determine what date a file was moved to a folder?

I have a scenario where I want to keep the existing 'created' dates of a few thousand files but note the date that they are moved to a new directory on the same drive in Windows explorer.. I have selected all of the obvious column/field headings and not found anything in Windows itself (although i might have missed something obvious!) - any thoughts on how this can be achieved?

many Thanks

psychic_teabag

Under linux, the modification time on the directory would be updated when a file is added to it. Don't know if windows does the same.

Stupid question: can you not just create a README file in the directory - the date would be recorded as the creation time on that file, and/or you could just write a note in the file recording the date as a string.

Would need a bit more info on what you are trying to do. Is this a move that has already happened, and you want to lnow when, or is this a move you are preparing to do, and need to record some information when you do it ?

Ant555

Skimming the process down, I am essentially asking a group of users in an office to do something with files in a source folder (pdf's and word docs) which will include opening it very briefly to view some data.

Then, I want each of them to close the file and then move the 'completed' files to a folder.

I want to be able to see how many files, for instance were copied to <TargetFolder> on any given day.

If I asked them to open a text file and fill something in then that would probably double the processing time.

psychic_teabag

One option would be to just use your daily backup logs to see the changes. (You do run backups, right ..?)

Looks like ntfs stores 3 timestamps per file : creation time, modify time, and access time. In this scenario, if the users are just reading from the file before moving it, the creation time should be preserved, and the access time should be when they opened it. (Of course, your nightly backup may well go on and modify the access time, which doesn't help you. An incremental backup might just advance it to the end of the same day, but a bigger backup would advance all the access times of the files changed that period. Some backups may be able to restore the access time, or access the file in such a way that the access time is not changed.)

psychic_teabag

Another way to do it could be to have a process actively watching the directory. Windows has an API ReadDirectoryChangesW which efficiently waits for a directory to change. I assume various scripting languages expose it. eg python - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/watchdog/0.5.4

Another possible option might be to use an ACL on the directory to cause windows to log accesses into the system log. But I'm a long way out of my comfort zone here !

esuhl

Why not move the contents of the "completed" folder into a dated folder (say, "2016-06-10-Completed") at the end of each day?

You could even set up a script to run at a certain time and move the files automatically.