topic Re: preserving creation date and modified date in Alfresco Archive

preserving creation date and modified date

patanne — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:06:37 GMT

I have a question to what, for me, is an absolute show-stopping issue.Using all methods of access, CIFS/WebDAV/web interface, to access Alfresco is there a global way (as in set it once for an entire volume) to ensure that the creation date and the modified date of any file copied from a traditional

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

mrogers — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:25:32 GMT

I think the answer is no you can't. (However I may be wrong here its not my area :mrgreen

But I think its worth raising an Enhancement request for this.

From looking at these forums the discussion seems to have got hung up with setting alfresco's read only properties which of course you quite rightly shouldn't be able to do. However the crucial insight for me is that the file system projections probably shouldnt be tied to the meta-data's cm:created and cm:modified properties.

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

mrogers — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:36:25 GMT

I found https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ENH-312 and added a link to this thread.

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

patanne — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:07:55 GMT

thanks for the response. i'm looking into the link you provided.

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

sobotka — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:33:32 GMT

Hello,
do I understand it correctly that it is still not possible to preserve the original document dates when inserting into Alfresco ? Or is there now (version 3.2 and above) a solution available ?
Petr

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

petter — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:43:09 GMT

Agreed. This might be a showstopper, having to custom develop something which is that basic.

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

patanne — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:53:26 GMT

This issue is nothing short of a major show-stopper. Because of the inability to do something so basic and essential I had to walk away from the product. Now though we are up to version 3.4, where the version was 3.2 when I first asked. Has anything changed? Has this most basic need and product oversight been fixed yet?

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

mikeh — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 21:12:13 GMT

Please see the discussion about this issue (and how, in fact, it's far from "basic" due to conflicting requirements!) https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALF-2565

Thanks,
Mike

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

patanne — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:06:41 GMT

I've just tested 4.0a and it would appear this problem still exists. While I can appreciate the comment by MikeH from Oct-2010, the inability of Alfresco to preserve something as fundamental and essential as creation and modified date from the source file system is a non-starter.

Is it possible I missed something in configuration?

Patrick

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

sasquatch58 — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 03:34:22 GMT

Hello Patrick,

These issues have been well covered in Martin Bergljung's book Alfresco 3 Business Solutions (Packt) in the section starting pp346 on Document migration.
Not saying all the answers are there but the problems are understood and some solutions provided.
One tool you could investigate and try is the Bulk Upload Tool http://code.google.com/p/alfresco-bulk-filesystem-import/.
Cheers,

Sasquatch

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

mrogers — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:32:27 GMT

This is changed to make it possible in, I think 3.4. As you note above the bulk import works, as do tools like RoboCopy over CIFS.

There still may be some use cases that don't or can't work, these need identifying and looking at.

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

mdonald — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:57:38 GMT

While Robocopy and successors address some use cases on Windows, I had a hard time finding a solution for Mac. I found one using muCommander and wrote it up here: http://oslawtools.org/?p=81

In case the link is blocked, here is the relevant portion:

Ultimately the solution that worked was using a Java based file manager called muCommander.

On a fresh Yosemite install, I ran into a few hiccups. First, I needed the applicable Java version, found here. Next, OSX through completely useless errors describing muCommander as "broken" and needing deletion or "not working on this Mac" and the like. These utterly unhelpful (deceitful, even) messages all related to the fact that OSX security settings prevented the application from running. This was easily changed in System Preferences | Security & Privacy. You should know what you are doing before changing those settings, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be told that they are there.

MuCommander allows you to mount the Destination SMB share to Alfresco easily, and apparently by default preserves file timestamps. It also has a more granular, file level left/right type GUI as well. Problem solved.

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

mrogers — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:17:32 GMT

Since this thread has come up again I thought I should also mention that there's an option in FileZilla to preserve original dates that works with Alfresco's FTP service.

Re: preserving creation date and modified date

mdonald — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 15:34:17 GMT

First, thanks to MRogers for the FTP tip (haven't tried it yet as I typically have FTP off on installs).

Apple seems to be regularly messing with the SMB implementation in OSX, probably in attempts to make sure Macs play nice with NAS devices and windows shares. In any case, Apple made changes in OSX 10.10.2 and as of that OS, MuCommander on Mac no longer preserves file creation metadata from legacy file systems. I now can't find any SMB or WebDAV approaches or applications to address this directly in MacOS.

MuCommander does preserve file create dates on both Win7 and Fedora 21. I was able to put together a Mac solution using a Fedora 21 VM in Virtualbox on a Mac host that ,while a pain, doesn't involve any license cost. The full post describing the steps will be here: http://oslawtools.org/?p=98
-Mark D.