The time problem of file

After experiments, the modification time and creation time of the decrypted file depend on the date and time of the encrypted file, not the time of the file before encryption. This shows that the date of the source file was not saved during the encryption process.
It is worth noting that the modification and creation time, in Winrar, provides an option to save.
Do not save file time. This may be a unified approach for encryption software, but I hope to see the first change. Please make sure that the developer has plans to solve this problem?

Welcome to the Cryptomator Community :slight_smile:

On my system everything works as expected. When i copy a file over the file explorer in the vault, the timestamp of that file is preserved. What version of Cryptomator are you using? Dokany or WebDAV? If Dokany, what is your Dokany version? And how do you copy that file (maybea special tool)? ON what filesystem is the vault stored? (in my case NTFS)

You have not yet understood the root of the problem.
Because there is no action to save time, it is impossible to recover the time after decryption.
It does not mean that it has been saved if it is not lost during the operation.
The encrypted file should be responsible for the complete recovery of the source file.
After the time of the encrypted file is modified, such as using a hexadecimal text editor, or the time of the encrypted file is modified by other tools or viruses, the time of the restored file becomes the time of the modified encrypted file time. This is equivalent to discarding the time characteristics of the source file.
Winrar or zip files will treat the time of the compressed package and the source file differently.

Ok, i think i understand you. You ask for something like, to save the file timestamps next to the data inside the encrypted file.

And can directly give you an answer: No, this won’t happen. First of all, the encrypted file is the source/real file here. The decrypted one is just a “view” of it. Hence, we need some additional data structure to keep track of the timestamps or save them next to content encrypted. But the next question would be, how changes are then easily detected? Cryptomator is designed to be used in connection with the cloud, i.e. synchronisation software. The majority of such programs rely (also) on the modification date, such that if we do not delegate it to the encrypted file, changes in the vault are not noticed and hence not uploaded/synced.

Obviously, the decryption process can be designed to be completely independent. There is no “next question” as you call it.
It is your freedom to insist on what you do, but please don’t use loose logic as an excuse.
So in the end, file container encryption is still the only reliable option.