How to copy an entire folder structure without copying the files (tip for starting the new financial year)

“After moving my files to another drive my folder’s modified date is updated. Is there way to change folder’s modified date based on the last modified file’s date in the folder? So i can keep my folders like old times.”

Not sure about xcopy, but as I replied here on 2019/07/15, folders’ timestamps can be left unchanged with Robocopy.
robocopy [source] [destination] /E /DCOPY:T /XF *
This copies an empty directory (folder) tree, preserving all files’ timestamps (which is the default behaviour) and all folders’ timestamps (with the /DCOPY:T switch). To also copy the files, simply remove the /XF * switch.

The only other Windows tools I know which allow to preserve all timestamps (including folders’ creation and modification timestamps) when copying a folder and its subfolders are :
– FastCopy, a GUI program which may be based on Robocopy (not sure but it has a similar behaviour, and the same bug in a very rare situation where there’s a conflict between the actual name of a file A being the same as the so-called “short name” of a file B — details here : http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2011/04/robocopy-limitations.shtml)
– Synchronize It, a GUI program which I’ve been using for years for transfer / synchronization purposes, streamlined and efficient, and contrary to robocopy or FastCopy or xcopy it allows to unselect specific files or folders before the copy, while still preserving the parent folders’ “modified” timestamps, although (since this is the main subject of this article) it doesn’t allow to copy an entire folder structure without copying at least one file per folder — I mean, it does copy empty folders, but when unselecting all files from a non-empty folder then the whole folder is ignored (it also has a bug which I discovered back in 2015 and reported to the author : the latest officiel release, version 3.5, corrupts so-called “sparse” files, a relatively little known NTFS feature which reduces the allocated size of files having many empty sectors, and which is often activated by various downloading programs unbeknownst to the user ; the author provided me with a corrected beta version, which I’ve been using ever since with no issue, but still hasn’t integrated that fix into a new official release, as he was working on new features, and had less time to do so in recent years — that’s what he explained to me just a few days ago, when we had a brief chat early in the morning as he was making breakfast for his children :^p ; still, that beta version is available here on his website, although it’s not explicitly referenced in the download section : grigsoft.com/wndsyncbu.zip ; so I would recommand installing Synchronize It with the current v. 3.5 installer, then replacing the wndsync.exe file [modified 2009/12/05] with the one from the beta update ZIP archive [modified 2015/10/04] – and perhaps donating a few bucks if you like it and can afford it, to encourage the guy to finally release an official 3.6 update !).

It should also be noted that although Robocopy preserves all the attributes pertaining only to metadata (“hidden”, “archive”, “system”…), it does not preserve the “compressed” attribute which involves a different way of writing the file’s contents ; not sure about the “sparse” attribute, I’ve had inconsistent experiences. Synchronize It does preserve NTFS compression (and v. 3.6 beta mentioned above preserves the “sparse” nature of “sparse” files).

Since I mentioned “sparse” files, as a now very tangential remark : the only tool I know which can turn a non-sparse file into a sparse file and actually de-allocate its empty clusters is a CLI program called SparseTest.exe, which I could only get through web.archive.org as the original website is now defunct. So it’s quite old, but works flawlessly. The native multi-purpose Windows tool fsutil can set the “sparse” attribute (fsutil sparse setflag [filename]), but it doesn’t re-write it, it only affects (I presume), future writings. Strangely, I couldn’t find a single tool to remove the “sparse” status of a file “in-place” once it’s set, the only way is to copy it with a tool which doesn’t preserve “sparse-ness” (like the basic Windows Explorer copy-paste, or the “copy” command in cmd.exe).

Hope it helps someone, somewhere, someday !

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