Chronological Backup Dating

The only thing that bugs me about the current backup feature (I don’t mind doing manual backups) apart from the glitch I mentioned in the bug forum is that it dates them in the most peculiar manner. I don’t know about anyone else, but I would love to be able to specify the time of date and time string that is used in the backup to something that sorts better (PM can come before AM such as in 16_2_11_11_29_PM and 16_2_11_12_23_AM). Even going 24-hour would be better (heck, I don’t know anyone who uses a 12-hour clock around here, and we all go year-month-day, too, which is the only way to sort things chronologically anyway).

The best backup dating would be YYYY-mm-dd HHMM. Chronological sorting is impossible any other way.

No disagreement with your preferred dating method–my backups on the Mac are done in that fashion, right up to the 24 hour clock. But I find I usually just sort by the “modified date” column–would that work for you in Explorer? Only real downside is that depending how you organize your backups, you may have to skim through to find the particular project you’re working on, and I can see that it might be a pain if you have a lot of different active projects all backing up to the same place. You could however make a folder per project to store all the backups for that project, and then sorting by date in the modified column should be simple and the whole thing would be more organized than dumping all your stuff into one massive backup folder, even with differently structured timestamps.

Just a thought, because it’s more fun to write here than put away groceries. :wink:

It would work so long as I don’t have to modify the backup zips at any time (which I will until the backup to zip problem is sorted). Then there’s always the chance of accidentally modifying them (stranger things have happened), or Windows glitches and changes the timestamp without it being modified (definitely wouldn’t be the first time).

Naturally, I have things ordered by project and month. There’s also a good possibility that I will never ever need to access anything inside one of these files. But it would still be nice to have them dated appropriately for their purpose. :mrgreen: