Lee Whitfield has undertaken a great study to show how file movements on MacOS systems affect the metadata on the destination.
According to author, HFS+ has five distinct date and time stamps:
- Created
- Modified (last written)
- Accessed
- Record Change
- Added Date
In his article Lee discusses how these timestamps change while a user copies or moves a file from HFS+ to HFS+, HFS+ to ExFAT, HFS+ to FAT32 and finally ExFAT or FAT32 to HFS+. Also you will learn about hidden “._” files and their timestamps.
Finally Whitfield notes that Access timestamp on HFS+ volumes is updated if user selects a file and click on “Get Info” from the context menu, but NOT updated updated when a file is opened and not saved.
