Find files by date modified in Windows

Using the date modified feature in Windows File Explorer allows you to find any files that were modified on a specific date or over a range of dates. Using this tip can be helpful for anyone who had lost a file, but knows when they last modified it.

How to find the date of modified files

1. Press the Windows key + E on the keyboard to open File Explorer.
2. On the left side scrolling menu, select the drive or folder where you’d like to view dates ( 1 ).

1. Then, on the right side of the screen, type datemodified: (make sure to include the colon) into the search box ( 2 ).
2. Once done, a menu similar to the one shown below should appear.

1. From here, you have a few options:

• View a single day — Navigate to the day you’re interested in and click it.
• View a range within a month — Click and hold down your left mouse button on the starting date, and then drag your mouse cursor to the ending date.
• View a range over a long period — If you need information that spans more than one month or year, you utilize a specific format in the search box. As an example, if you’d like to view the modified dates between October 13, 2018, and November 10, 2018, you would type: datemodified:10/31/2018 .. 11/10/2018 exactly as it is written there, and then press Enter .

Windows 10 «date modified» for folder working properly.

I have some folders and files get copied in them, I need to sort the folders by «date modified», but the date isn’t updated in Windows 10, it does sometime but most of the time it doesn’t.

Please note that this «functionality» works perfectly fine in Windows 7.

When you have 50 folder it is a pain to check every single one of them to see if they have new files.

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Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community.

We understand your concern and will certainly help you to get your query resolved.

To assist you better please provide few details:

1) Are you facing this issue on a local account or the Microsoft account?

I suggest you to follow the below given methods and check if it helps.

Method 1:

Sign out from the current user account, restart the system and login to the Admin account to check if that helps.

Method 2:

Perform SFC Scan.

You can try to run SFC scan to find missing or corrupt files that may be causing this issue.

System File Checker (SFC) checks that all Windows 10 system files are intact and not corrupted, changed, or damaged.

1. Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and select Run as Administrator.
2. Click Continue or supply Administrator credentials if prompted.
3. In the Command Prompt window type the following, and press Enter:

sfc /scannow

1. You should see the following on-screen message:
Beginning the system scan. This process will take some time.
Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification % complete.
1. Once the scan has completed, test to see whether the issue that you are experiencing is resolved or not.
Refer the KB article for more information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833.

Ensure to install any pending updates and restart the system to check the status.

Hope the information helps. Do reply if you need further assistance, we will be happy to help you.

Thank you.

Rules for “Date Modified” of folders in Windows Explorer

How does Windows Explorer determine the «Date Modified» field for folders? [Aside: I know this is asking from an explorer-specific perspective, but the behaviour could be useful to coding search/sort type activities]

Is there a definitive description of this anywhere — searches of Microsoft, MSDN, Google & Stack Overflow have been unsuccessful.

Personal experiments seem to suggest that in a tree of folders:

1. when a folder/file is added/deleted in a folder, the containing folder’s date modified is updated.
2. when the content of a file is modified, the containing folder is unaffected

However, I’m looking at some directories that don’t seem to conform to these basic rules — running down the tree I have (dates in DD/MM/YYYY format):

60s delay. House of (sch)ticks on silicon. – crokusek Aug 3 ’17 at 19:05

2 Answers 2

This is not explorer specific, this is NTFS-related.

Note: Modified time can be disabled with filesystem option, so you should never rely on it. Any suggested reliable methods would be appreciated.

Disclaimer: I tested all of these myself on Windows 10. I could not find an authoritative source documenting all of these behaviours. It is entirely possible that I made a mistake somewhere.

The folder’s last modified time is updated for these actions:

• new file or folder directly in target folder
• renamed file or folder directly in target folder
• deleted file or folder directly in target folder
• hardlink create/delete/rename — same as files
• file/folder symlink create/delete/rename
• directory junction create/delete/rename

It is not updated for these actions:

• modified contents of file directly in target folder
• edit target of symlink or junction contained in target folder
• file’s or sub-folder’s created/modified date changing
• edit basic attributes (hidden/archive/system) of a direct child
• NTFS compression/encryption change of a direct child
• anything at all happening in a sub-folder — literally anything
• changing attributes of the folder itself
• changing owner/ACL of the folder itself
• owner or ACL of a direct child changing
• if the folder is a directory junction, changing the target
• adding/deleting alt data streams to a direct child file

How do I modify file date created?

Is there an easy way to modify file date created without outside software?

Replies (6) 

You can modify the date created by copying a file. The file’s created date becomes the modified date and the current date (when the file is copied) becomes the created date. You can copy a file on your PC to check.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

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Thanks for the quick reply.

Yes that would work, but I want to change it to a specific date.

Is there any command like the touch -d command in Linux?

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We appreciate your response. The easiest way for you to modify the files to a specific date is by using a 3rd party application that you can search in Windows Store. Or you can also post a feedback about your query using the Feedback Hub, which is readily available in Windows 10.

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I use the third party utility SKTimeStamp — Stefan’s Tools and it works very well for what you want. It adds a tab to the file’s Properties so it is easy to use — where you can see the existing entries below you can just overwrite them with the dates-times that you want.

You could use the built-in capabilities of Powershell to do this job but you would have to work out a user interface to suit your needs. SKTimeStamp covers that already.

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How to Change File Date or Timestamp in Windows

Windows maintains three different date/timestamps for every file and folder. They are “Date Created”, “Date Modified”, and “Date Accessed”. In some situations, you may have to change the modified, created, or last accessed timestamp of a file or folder.

For instance, I had to change the timestamp of some files to test the Robocopy sync method when writing an article on folder compare and synchronization. Other users may need to change the date or time of a file for backup or archiving purpose.

Let’s see some methods to change the created date, modified date, or last accessed date of files in this article.

Change File Creation, Last Accessed or Modified Date

Using PowerShell

To change the file date using PowerShell, here are the commands you need to run:

Change the creation date/timestamp of a file named log1.txt:

Change the last write date/timestamp of a file named log1.txt:

Change the last accessed date/timestamp of a file named log1.txt:

Change the date/timestamp of all files in a folder named Test:

To change the timestamp of all files in a folder, use the following syntax:

Note that the above command changes the timestamp for every file and subfolder in a folder. To apply the change only for files (i.e., exclude sub-folders), use this syntax:

Change the last write date/timestamp of a “Folder”

View Created, Modified, and Last accessed date of all files in a folder

To view the date modified, date created, and date last written data for all files in a folder, use the following command-line syntax:

You’ll see an output like this:

Using NirCmd from Nirsoft

Using NirCmd, a multi-purpose command-line tool from Nirsoft.net, you can change the file date and timestamp.

Here is the command-line syntax to change the file timestamp using NirCmd:

• The first parameter can be a single filename or wildcard string.
• The dates parameters must be specified in the following format: “dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss” if a date parameter is not specified or you specify an empty string (“”), the date won’t be changed.
• If you specify «now» as the date parameter, the current date and time will be used.

Examples

To change the timestamp of all text files in a folder, here’s the command-line syntax:

Using BulkFileChanger from Nirsoft

BulkFileChanger is another useful tool from Nirsoft.net can modify the created, modified, or accessed time of one or multiple files. It can also change the file attributes (Read-Only, Hidden, System) en masse.

Start BulkFileChanger and add the files into it. When adding files to the list, you can optionally choose to add files in sub-folders and also set the recursion level accordingly.

Select all files, and click Change Time/Attributes from the Action menu.

You may want to uncheck the Time is specified in GMT first, as most of us prefer inputting the local time rather than the GMT.

Input the Created, Modified, or Accessed date/time. To fill up the current time in all the fields, click on the Fill Current Time button below.

For images taken from a camera, the EXIF or the metadata field contains the Date taken field, which is separate from NTFS’s date modified/created data. You can view the EXIF data from the JPG file’s properties, or using the ExifDataView utility from Nirsoft.net.

That said, BulkFileChanger also allows you to change the Date Taken timestamp (EXIF metadata). To change the date metadata, click on the No Change button, and select the appropriate option.

The EXIF – Generated Time corresponds to the Date Taken metadata, and this field is displayed under the Date column of File Explorer. Also, many programs use this value as the official date/time of the picture.

Note that you can change the EXIF date of a camera image only if the date/time values already exist inside the .jpg files. BulkFileChanger cannot add new fields into the EXIF data.

And, optionally, you can also copy the timestamp from Modified, Created, Accessed, EXIT – Generated Time, EXIT – Stored Time, or the EXIT – Modified Time and apply the same to other date fields automatically.

Command-line support

BulkFileChanger also supports command-line operations so that you don’t have to open the GUI every time. Check out BulkFileChanger homepage for command-line help/the list of arguments supported.