Preserving bagged file's creation date

[John Rees]

We're exploring DART as a Bagger replacement for packaging born-digital archival collections.

I noticed that unlike Bagger, DART does not preserve a file's original system creation/modified dates during the packaging step and instead it creates a new today's date system date. This is undesirable from a data provenance perspective.

I looked through the documentation for a configuration option, but perhaps this isn't a DART use case?

TIA,

John

National Library of Medicine

[Kieran O Leary]

Hi John,

How are you packaging the bag? I’ve found that using TAR preserves date modified anyhow. No packaging on the bag tends to lose the file system dates. I definitely think it’s desirable to retain this information where possible!

I raised this in GitHub a while back and I think it might get more attention for DART 3?

https://github.com/APTrust/dart/issues/530

Best,

Kieran O’Leary

Digital Repository Services Manager

National Library of Ireland

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[Nathan Tallman]

Hi John and Kieran,

Yes, it's a known bug in DART 2 that the file dates are lost when creating a bagged directory (as opposed to a TAR). As Kieran links to, we do have a ticket for this. We have a DART 3 alpha right now, but it's still rough and not widely released. Our new Lead Developer is starting next week, so I'm hoping we can get the DART 3 alpha out for more testing in 2025 and be sure this is fixed.

In the meantime, I suggest creating TARs. (Requests for other sterilization formats like ZIP are also noted internally!)

Thanks,

Nathan

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Nathan Tallman

Executive Director, APTrust

nathan....@aptrust.org / ntal...@virginia.edu

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[John Rees]

Thanks so much for the quick feedback. TARing isn't part of our repository data model, but we'll look forward to trying out the next version.

John