Hi, I use the standard archive function and have found some problems.
It is not possible to store the correct Created and Accessed time for these archives.
.tar, .tbz2, .tgz, .txz
Whenever I extract these archives I see in the column a different Created and Accessed time than the original file and folder.
This does not store the Accessed time.
.7z
These have no problems.
.zip, .rar
Tested with Directory Opus 12.24.5 (Beta)
Accessed and Created timestamps are not supported by 7z.dll's Tar functionality, as far as I can tell. (The Created timestamp will be set to the same as the parent archive's, for lack of a better value being available. The Accessed timestamp isn't shown at all for Tar files.)
The 7-Zip application seems to be the same, unless things have changed since I last updated my copy.
Accessed timestamps are fairly meaningless (and often not updated at all on recent versions of Windows). Why would you want them?
You are right, I have tested 7-Zip 19.00 and 21.03 beta version and for TAR only Modified time is supported.
https://www.7-zip.org/download.html
Is this a problem of the archive format, because TAR does not support Created and Accessed time, or a problem of 7-Zip?
On my Windows computer, Accessed time is always updated by default. If there are problems, perhaps this could be the cause.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/139015-enable-disable-ntfs-last-access-time-stamp-updates-windows-10-a.html
Tar doesn't seem to be a very well defined format, and there's a variety of support for things in different tools. There are some Tar tools which will store the extra timestamps (although not by default, from what I've seen) but 7-Zip and 7z.dll don't seem to have any options to do so, unless they are undocumented.
What useful information does it give you, though? If you're archiving the files, they're all going to be accessed at the time the archive was made. If you look at the directory the files are in, the files may all be accessed to populate columns with metadata information. The Properties dialog that shows the accessed timestamp will also access the files, and it always showed the current time for it as a result (back before the timestamp was basically disabled in Windows because it's a waste of time to update it). The accessed timestamp simply isn't useful, even when it is updated, in most situations.
What are the names of these Tar tools? Can these tools for Tar store the Created, Modified and Accessed timestamps for files and folders on an NTFS volume or only the Modified and Accessed timestamps?
I want to know when the file or folder was last read. This is very useful when I show some text files, images and videos in a presentation.
Sometimes I also listen to music or watch movies and I find it very useful that I can easily sort Accessed timestamp.
On my Windows 10 computer the Accessed timestamp does not update when I archive the file, here is a screenshot. I created a .zip file in Directory Opus and then opened the .zip file in 7-Zip and can see that all three timestamps (Created, Modified and Accessed) were stored correctly.
I don't know, I just found out about them via Google.
That's going to be when the archive was made, since the file has to be read to make the archive.
Does it ever update? Accessed timestamps do not update by default in some versions of Windows.
Why use Tar for this, anyway? It's usually only used.for Linux/Unix stuff.
If you want you can add it and I will test if it works in the next beta version.
I tried it several times and also have a file from year 2018 and it was stored correctly and when creating the archive (.zip) Accessed timestamp was not updated.
This website says.
https://help.migraven.com/en/last-access-time-files-windows-file-system-activation/
For Windows XP, it is turned on by default.
For Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, the attribute is disabled by default.
Windows 10 and Windows 11 should behave the same way as in Windows XP.
I thought it was a bug and didn't know that Tar was developed almost exclusively for Linux/Unix.
Initially I thought that all archive formats provided by Directory Opus behaved exactly like the installed operating system, that is, it supports NTFS (Created, Modified and Accessed) timestamps.
But Tar doesn't support that and it looks like it only supports Modified timestamp. It would be good if it can be added to your documentation.
I will probably only use
.zip, .rar and .7z
in the future because they support Created, Modified and Accessed timestamps.
