Is there a way to backup (copy) data with their time creation stamps from a NTFS filesystem to a ext4 filesystem? http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2011/03/14/digital-forensics-understanding-ext4-part-2-timestamps: There's a "crtime" (create time) timestamp in the debugfs stat output. Yes, EXT4 finally supports a "born on" time (btime) like NTFS, giving the timestamp for when the file was created within the disk volume.
This hasn't been implemented, but sounds like something that woulnd't be that hard to code up into the the crtime patch.
Hi Wayne, I'd like to thank you for picking this up. What's the current status? I would also love to see Samba preserving NTFS file creation timestamps – many people have gathered files over the years, and now want to move to a Linux-based NAS. To me, these file creation timestamps are very important. (File modification timestamps work as expected.)
If someone would like to research how code checks a crtime, coming up with a patch that changes the existing crtime.diff patch would be appreciated (or even just reporting the result of the research). Otherwise I will look into it at some point in the future.