HI everybody,

I'm new at foresincs. I made a dd image of a disk drive and opened it in my computer with autopsy. I want to verify the creation date of some files. The issue is that it is not the same date that was supposed to be. The question is: if I cut and paste a file in windows xp, is the creation data of the file modified?

Thanks in advance.  

The creation date is the date and time the file is created on the media - it is not related to the modified date
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Michael Cotgrove
www.cnwrecovery.com
cnwrecovery.blogspot.com/ 

Hi,

I now creation date is the date the file "landed" on the device. The question is: if I move a file on windows Xp, is the creation data altered? And, most important, can I assume that if modification date is before creation date, the file was copied from another location and wasn't created in that filesystem?  

The best answer to your question is to try it.

Working on tests and seeing the results will mean you will understand how dates get applied and used.
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Michael Cotgrove
www.cnwrecovery.com
cnwrecovery.blogspot.com/ 

- Chisco77

The question is: if I cut and paste a file in windows xp, is the creation data of the file modified?

Sometimes when people say cut and paste, they mean copy and paste. A copied file in Win XP will not bear the creation date of the original. An actual cut and paste is equivalent to Move, which does maintain the creation date. (Edit: even across volumes.)

If the modification date precedes the creation date, you can assume that something unusual happened, i.e., that the file was not created and updated in place. There could be several causes: perhaps the clock changed, perhaps it was copied from another location, etc.

Quite often, when a file is copied from external media, the source file system is FAT, which has distinctly different timestamp characteristics from NTFS. For example, if the modification time is truncated to an even number of seconds, that's an indication it may have been copied from a FAT device such as a flash drive.
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Scott Tucker
Aptegra Consulting, LLC
www.aptegra.com 

Tucker,

thanks for your answer. It confirms muy suspects. I tried and move, copied, cut &pasted a file in windows and creation date wasn't changed. Something else happenned to that file!  

Here again with file creation date. If I go to right button-properties I see a different creation date in the general tag than in the details tab. It is an Autocad file. Why are there two creation dates?