FAT32 File Creation/Birth Time Reporting Finally Comes To Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FAT32 File Creation/Birth Time Reporting Finally Comes To Linux

Finally for FAT file-systems with the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel is support via the statx() system call for reporting a file's birth/creation time...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FAT-File-Creation-Birth-5.19

[Nth_man]

As it was previously written, "creation time" has a real sense only in some cases:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1324454-linux-fat-file-creation-birth-time-reporting-proposal-for-statx-i-o-alignment-info?p=1324600#post1324600

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1324454-linux-fat-file-creation-birth-time-reporting-proposal-for-statx-i-o-alignment-info?p=1324601#post1324601

[jabl]

Since creation timestamp is one of the on disk attributes that FAT stores, and reporting it is semi standard via statx it makes sense to wire them together.

[Retramon]

As it was previously written, "creation time" has a real sense only in some cases:
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...00#post1324600
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...01#post1324601

As a Windows-grown user, I wouldn't know how to live without creation dates, it has many uses with sorting and figuring things out.
Linux people seem to keep downplaying the usefulness of this, it's very simple, if you haven't used an OS with creation times for more than a decade you simply won't figure it out where it comes very handy, and having a different workflow would also keep one away from getting into those situations. There's many cases, I can't remember them all, mainly it's sorting in Explorer (file manager), but many cases it rescued serious problems such as badly recursively renamed files or similar, where creation date can help restore the order, in many cases modified time is not enough and when I want to see the original ordering only file creation can cover that.

It's a total no brainer and I can't believe people lived for decades without creation dates, how the heck would I sort my downloads folder if I did modifications for example ... but while it doesn't mean you modify most files, a few of them skews things. Recently I was archiving a lot of documents and had to correct some older ones, they're correctly ordered if sorted with creation date even after my edits.

PS: I don't think it's really that necessary to care about the mainstream popularity of various OS tools and capabilities that are there for people with serious work on their mind to use, so I think it shouldn't be fair to count those rather irrelevant users and use-cases in, even tho that's what the representatives and contributors to a piece or pieces of software tend to think overly about, isn't the purpose of these opensource or however you want to call it, systems mainly to benefit those who are actively part of the community and are also contributing, in many different ways. All of these distros, middlewares, should care more about what WE want, not what someone else wants, that should always be second.

So to only use the easy popularity argument and throw something into a niche on a whim and have that actually influence the development of major systems is I think irresponsible. A lot of these things should go through a negotiation process of pros-cons and weighting it against the obvious facts, are we building these things for us, or we're really just serving free lunch to the public at large

Now, if the core users don't use it and it's a niche in that place ... yes that is valid, but it's not over yet, it's what I mentioned in the beginning, lack of a capability made most of these users find other ways in a way that they never thought how such a capability could solve their issue and also happened to never got into a situation that would get into a thought process that would get them to want such a capability. Sometimes we can imagine what we would need, many times not, unless you're at a job fully looking for improvements on purpose.
Sometimes the capability has to be available for a period of time and actually suggested, to actually give it a good test of it's usefulness, it is also up to the users to figure it out how a capability could suit them. Moreover, user's tendency to keep to estabilshed workflow, if they're locked onto it and not open to new solutions they would prevent themselfs getting help from a capability that may be available all along. It is one of the things that would falsely cast a bad image onto a capability, this goes on all over the place, it can be stealthy as well, there's many factors and it's not always the capability's fault, and it's very easy for new or seasoned users to fall into a trap of irresponsibly dismissing a capability. Ofcourse all of this isn't necessairly so in many other cases too, not like I'm saying there's so much of this out there, but there probably is some.

[Danny3]

I could never understood why does the creation time was not available for many file systems from the beginning and just the modified and accessed time.
there are many cases where the creation date is more important to know than the other two.
Glad to see it fixed in one more place.
I now wonder if it's displayed ok for ExFAT and NTFS filesystems.

[Developer12]

I could never understood why does the creation time was not available for many file systems from the beginning and just the modified and accessed time.
there are many cases where the creation date is more important to know than the other two.
Glad to see it fixed in one more place.
I now wonder if it's displayed ok for ExFAT and NTFS filesystems.

Unix.

[Nth_man]

Backups are used to restore files. What is the "creation time" of a restored file?

This is a common case where the user is told a "creation time" that is not real. Can users trust what they are told? They must know all the circumstances of a file in order to trust that the creation time that they see is the real one. Only if requirements like that are met... a "creation time" is useful (instead of misleading).

[Danny3]

Backups are used to restore files. What is the "creation time" of a restored file?

This is a common case where the user is told a "creation time" that is not real. Can users trust what they are told? They must know all the circumstances of a file in order to trust that the creation time that they see is the real one. Only if requirements like that are met... a "creation time" is useful (instead of misleading).

This remind me of a thought experiment that I had:
If we had the technology to make perfectly accurate 3D copy of the Earth, the people on the second Earth would still think that everything was created thousands or millions years ago when in reality would be just a few moments ago.
At the same time the geologist and evolution people make me laugh when they are so certain that their evidences cannot be wrong when in reality somebody with enough knowledge and means could've just created everything as it is to look like it's old or very old.

[Nth_man]

This remind me of a thought experiment that I had:
If we had the technology to make perfectly accurate 3D copy of the Earth, the people on the second Earth would still think that everything was created thousands or millions years ago when in reality would be just a few moments ago.
At the same time the geologist and evolution people make me laugh when they are so certain that their evidences cannot be wrong when in reality somebody with enough knowledge and means could've just created everything as it is to look like it's old or very old.

Yes, it reminds me of saving a game, changing data of the saved game, and loading the saved game. Now the game thinks that something happened (but that didn't happen). It's a useful technique.

What can you be certain of? Or me :-? (last night I was dreaming, and everything looked real, like now :-) )

[Nth_man]

Additionally, we can imagine people sorting by creation time without taking into account the files that have been restored from backups, files that have been created instead of modified and so on :-( . "creation time" has a sense when users know the absolutely complete history of a file, etc.