A PC file copy puzzle.

[Keatah]

Using whatever tools and utilities, including vintage stuff from the 1990's, is there any way to transfer files and folders from a doublespaced drive to a modern windows system, and then back to the vintage pc, AND keep the dates of the folders intact?

[Osgeld]

last time I did it was with a network connected machine and I was able to browse the machine through windows explorer (after sharing the drive in windows 3.11)

 

from there I used winrar with the option to store creation date

 

I am sure there are creative ways to acheive similar results

 

Some utility that will save creation dates and make an archive (rar maybe some of the unix utilities)

A place to put them and a way to get them there and back to a new target drive

 

to be totally safe, I don't think you want the files touching a live filesystem while moving stuff around while trying to retain the attributes, though I move stuff around all the time and it always saves creation, modified and accessed timestamps (and of course a trial run on some other target media to make sure its what you want before you commit)

Edited July 15, 2018 by Osgeld

[mr_me]

I've read 7zip can read the doublespace drive file. Do you need to write back to the compressed drive?

 

or

Connect a second drive to the computer and transfer everything over. Use that drive to transfer with the newer computer. I'm assuming both drives don't have to be doublespaced.

 

or

Create a virtual machine that boots to ms-dos with doublespace support. Connect the doublespace drive to the newer computer.