Migration Assistant & Date Added

[MacBeard]

I just got a new MacBook and set it up using the Migration Assistant. It was super quick, but I noticed all the "date added" properties were changed to the date and time of the migration.

Is there a way to just "clone" my old drive into the new Mac instead, the "date added" sorting can be preserved?

A few more details in case they help.

• I'm moving to a MacBook Pro (M2) from an iMac (21.5-inch, 2017). The iMac has a 1 TB HDD which is very slow, so I hooked up an external 500 GB SSD and boot from there instead.
• When using Migration Assistant, I plugged the external SSD into the new MacBook Pro and let it transfer in from there, instead of Mac to Mac.
• I know sorting by date added isn't the best way to keep track of my files, but there are cases where it really helps for me.
• I'm very willing to wipe the new MacBook and starting over with the transfer. Haven't done any work on it yet.

Would doing a Time Machine backup of the external SSD preserve the "date added" property when restoring into the new Mac, or would it have the same result as transferring from a startup disk?

Is there a way to do "clone" the drive through Disk Utility instead of doing a Migration Assistant transfer?

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Brian33]

TL;DR -- I don't think there's any practical way to preserve Finder's "date added" sorting.

I don't think cloning your (Intel) iMac's boot disk to the new (M2) MBP will work, due to the CPU architecture differences (though I suppose I could be wrong). In any case, the cloning tools I'm familiar with (CCC) would not copy Spotlight's database (see below why this is important), as I'm pretty sure I read in CCC documentation that it's excluded. Apparently the database is tied to a specific volume and wouldn't be valid for the new (destination) volume.

I would stick with your Migration Assistant results.

Would doing a Time Machine backup of the external SSD preserve the "date added" property when restoring into the new Mac, or would it have the same result as transferring from a startup disk?

This may be possible. I saw a posting (which I've lost track of), that suggested that TM could re-assign the "date added". But given my findings below, I'm skeptical it would work. I didn't try this method, however; you could do a test with a small folder.

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Your question made me curious, and I also had a situation once that depended upon Finder's "date added" sorting, so I looked into it a bit...

According to this (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53341670/access-the-file-date-added-in-terminal), the Finder's "date added" info is stored in Spotlight's metadata for the file. It's not an attribute of the file in the filesystem itself, like "date created" or "date of last access" are.

One can display Spotlight's "date added" value in Terminal.app with the command mdls -name kMDItemDateAdded FILENAME

Spotlight's metadata is saved in a database, not directly in the filesystem's attributes for a file. So it seems that any means of simply copying the file itself would miss that metadata. I don't know of any way to set a file's Spotlight kMDItemDateAdded property directly. (I tried setting it as an extended attribute of a file, but it had no effect.)

Also, this (https://mymac.info/post/how-to-set-date-added-metadata-in-mac-os-x-107-lion) says, in part:

I can't find a way to set the "Date Added" shown in the Finder.
I believe you're correct that it's retrieved from the Spotlight index's kMDItemDateAdded metadata attribute. However, Spotlight appears to derive this itself in some way. I've tried setting up an extended file attribute called com.apple.metadata:kMDItemDateAdded to a date value in one of several different formats, including the format used by kMDItemDateAdded and none of them were picked up by the Spotlight index, i.e. no matter what the value shown by xattr, the value shown by mdls wasn't changed.
I would guess, though I don't know for sure, that Spotlight simply sets this date based on the first time it indexes a file in a particular location, and doesn't check any other metadata in order to generate it. If you mv a file out of Downloads and back in, the Date Added updates to when it was moved back in, but none of the file metadata seems affected, only the Spotlight metadata.
So, in summary, I reckon Date Added is only stored somewhere in the rather cryptic guts of /.Spotlight-V100, and unless someone can come up with a way of telling Spotlight to update a metadata entry to an arbitrary value, I can't see a way of doing this.

I agree with the poster.

Alas.

 

[HDFan]

Is there a way to just "clone" my old drive into the new Mac instead, the "date added" sorting can be preserved?

It is annoying, but technically correct since it was the date the file was added to the storage. As above you just use date created or date modified which don't change.

 

[TripleYoThreat]

It is annoying, but technically correct since it was the date the file was added to the storage. As above you just use date created or date modified which don't change.

Generally that's fine, but where I ran into it the most was, files that were zipped and are now unzipped, have a different date modified than what is beknownst to us. So the only way to properly track / sort those is date added.

Although I do suppose that's the exception and not the norm.

I can confirm that CCC or an otherwise partition clone does keep date added. Only other benefits are, apps do not need to request permissions again, the launchpad order stays the same (I believe this changes when using migration assistant). But the cons are rather heavy. It's a bit laggy compared to the migration assistant. Not laggy per se, but just not as smooth, in operation.

Any news on time machine keeping the date added? although, restoring from a time machine might run me into the same problems above. possibly using migration assistant, off the time machine, could work. but unlikely.

if there's a way to 'copy' the spotlight database, I might even consider that lol

thanks all for any news

 

[InfoTime]

I just noticed the same thing on a recent migration. Desktop and Documents folders seemed to have the dates preserved. But the Downloads folder had every file timestamped as the date of the migration. Very annoying.

Haven't tried it yet, but thinking about manually copying the files. Not sure if that will work or not.

 

[HDFan]

Downloads folder had every file timestamped as the date of the migration. Very annoying.

Date added is reset to migration date but creation and modification dates are preserved.

 

[FLYT3]

I have the exact same problem. Just migrated via time machine from a 2011 imac running High Sierra 10.13 to a imac pro 2017 running Sonoma 14.4.1

All my Music collection and Traktor pro 3.5.3 303 (mp3) collection have not retained the original date added and i really need that to browse specific date range within Traktor. Need a solution fast.. Can someone please help🙏