Preface, Background and Use Cases

File copying on Windows has a little known issue -- Windows does not preserve the file creation timestamp when copied. The new copy of a file is created with a new creation date timestamp at the time of copying, and not the time the original file was actually created.

This shortcoming, however, does not affect file moving. Theoretically, the last modified timestamps are not affected and would be preserved.

To preserve the timestamp during file copying, special file copying utilities must be used, such as Robocopy with the copy:T and dcopy:T flags. Copying files using Explorer would lose their creation timestamps.

This problem becomes serious for users who use File Explorer or other file copying tools that do not perserve file timestamps for doing file backups. File backups created by copying to a different storage drive would have files with incorrect creation timestamps as the original ones are lost.

There are software that fix (or at least attempt to) erroneous time stamps. Some notable ones are BatchTouch, BulkFileChanger, Restamper, NewFileTime, Attribute Changer and ExifTool etc.

They are ideal for simple use cases such as setting files to a certain date time as specified by the user, multiple time stamp attributes for a single file, or for a specific or limited common file types or formats e.g. JPEG with EXIF data. However, for large number of files accumulated in different formats over a long period (e.g. over years or decades), coupled with inconsistent metadata tagging, more often than not, they are missing the metadata to restore their timestamps. These simple tools usually give up, ignore and move on without correcting the timestamps for these files.

WRECK is developed to fill more sophisticated needs that these simple tools do not address. It is designed to:

• Bulk process a folder or directory of files recursively

• Able to extract and use date time metadata embedded in files by its authoring or producing software for as many formats as possible. This is done by using well-known open source libraries like:

  1. Apache Tika,
  2. ExifTool,
  3. MediaInfo and
  4. 7-Zip

  to maximize the chance of successful metadata extraction.

• Fallback on using heuristic rules to guess or estimate a date time to take advantage of any metadata (file or folder naming convention by user, device or generator software) that can be used for reasonable inferences

• Analyze and preview date time adjustment changes before applying them to enable a user to experiment with the ideal settings

• Review statistics on file types and metadata to examine the effectiveness of metadata extraction using tables and bar/pie charts

• Backup, verify and restore time stamps before and after modification for safety