It is amazing how many times you will find yourself in a situation where you have to change or modify the dates of a file or folder, such as the creation date, the last modification date or the last access date.
We won’t really ask WHY anyone would do this , but based on experience gathered online, we found it very helpful in certain circumstances.
Changing the date in a file is pretty tricky if you try to do it yourself, but luckily there are some really nice free apps that can do the job for you quickly and easily.
How to change the creation date of a file?
We’ll quickly go through three different applications , each of which do almost the same thing, but we’d prefer to mention more than less in case one doesn’t work for you.
BulkFileChanger
It runs on 32 or 64-bit versions of Windows and is compatible from Windows 2000 to Windows 8 . It doesn’t require installation, which is another big plus. Once you run the program, you will immediately recognize its simple GUI interface.
To get started, simply click on File and then Add File. Go ahead and choose the file or folder you want to change the date / time for. Once it appears in the list, select it and then click Actions – Change Time / Attributes.
Here you can manually change the file time by checking the boxes you want to change . There are options to add a certain period of time to the current times or to copy them once to another.
After changing the time, click the Start button and go to Windows Explorer to make sure the time has changed accordingly.
As you can see here, I changed the date of the Modification Date to a day of the week , making the modification date earlier than the actual creation date / time. Of course it doesn’t make sense, but there is no verification system here, so be careful what you change.
Change attributes
If you are changing the date and time of a large number of files / folders on your PC then you may want to check Change Attributes.
It is a shell extension that allows you to right-click on a file or folder to perform actions such as changing the date / time and much more. This program has also recently been updated and includes support for Windows XP up to Windows 8. In addition, it is also compatible with 64-bit Windows.
Once installed, go ahead and log out, then log back into Windows. Now, when you right click on any file or folder, you will see a new option called Change Attributes.
In the dialog box that appears, you will see many options . Everything is quite simple: the top is for file properties and the bottom is for timestamps.
SetFileDate 2.0
It is a bit older as it hasn’t been updated in several years. We recommend it for Windows XP only. This program has a nicer interface and allows you to make a multiple selection from an explorer type interface instead of having to add files one by one.
You can also change folder dates using SetFileDate. It is very small and very easy to use, OR and we almost forgot, if you are a Mac user, you can check out a program called A Better Finder Attributes which will allow you to change the date and time of a file, but it costs around $ 15!
