25th June 2001

Viewing the properties of a file will reveal three interesting date/time stamps to you that might seem a bit confusing when you really take notice of the values. The three attributes are Created, Modified and Accessed. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's when the file was first born, but rather when it was created on the media. When a file is copied from one disk to another, a new file is created, thus the newly crafted version will carry a Created date that corresponds to when the file was copied to the disk. Follow? Ok, next there's the Modified date/time. When making a copy of a file, the modified time is carried over from the original in most cases. This identifies the last time the file was altered in some way. Sometimes developers use the Modified date to identify a version of the file by forcing a specific date/time stamp to be written to the file. The modified value is also the one represented when viewing a file's information from DOS.

Last and probably least is Accessed. This represents the file was opened in some way for read or write. Notice that when viewing the Accessed date from explorer's Details view (and adding the Accessed column), the dates are all different for the various files, but if you right-click and check out the properties for the file, it magically changes to the current date. This indicates that Explorer has opened the file for read. Also note that the time may be 12:00AM for all files. This is due to a limitation in the FAT/FAT32 file systems from 12:00AM because the file system does not support the time value; only the date, so it's left at 12:00AM.