Why doesn't DROID capture 'date created'?

[kathaurielle]

A user (who can't access Github) asks: 'I’m working on my organisation’s digital preservation programme and have been asked to find out why the DROID tool does not extract a file’s “date created” metadata?'

Are these possible reasons:
Wasn't captured as a user need when DROID was developed, but we have now noted this request
Not always easy to capture(?)

[steve-daly]

Date Created is not a consistent file-system property across different platforms (e.g. there's no file-system Date Created value on Linux). Some formats (e.g. MSOffice) have document properties reflecting creation dates, but DROID intentionally doesn't extract complex properties such as this - instead focusing on its core purpose in characterising file formats.

Tools such as Apache Tika (https://tika.apache.org/) is normally used for extracting Creation Date and other similar properties from files.

[prettybits]

@steve-daly

e.g. there's no file-system Date Created value on Linux

I'm curious what you mean here? I'm not aware of any common Linux filesystem that doesn't support recording file creation times. In case you are thinking of the default display of ls -l in a bash shell for example, that does default to showing the modification time, but calling it like ls -l --time=created would show the creation time instead. Are you thinking of any specific filesystem?

[steve-daly]

Yes, you're right. I'm often using EXT3 or NFS mounted volumes on Linux and I don't think either of those support creation time (although maybe modern NFS does pass this through). DROID is generally platform agnostic so we could see if there's a crtime-like filesystem parameter that's consistent across operating systems.

[ross-spencer]

I often roll out this resource on Wikipedia when I talk about the properties available on different file-systems. Always an interesting one to think about (plus how many file systems there are!).

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Metadata

[kathaurielle]

Thank you all! Have been in touch with the user, maybe they'll join in on another device.

[prettybits]

Ooh, very interesting, and thanks for the reminder of the Wikipedia comparison! I wasn't aware that ext3 didn't/doesn't support creation timestamps since ext4 has been around for so long now. About NFS, the "birth-time" file attribute should be supported with NFSv4 and corresponding support should have been added to nfsd in Linux 5.17 (https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/EF97E1F5-B70F-4F9F-AC6D-7B48336AE3E5@oracle.com/). Maybe worth an investigation?