Linux creation date of all notes is 1970-01-01 (read birth date properly)

Bug graveyard
,
1

Steps to reproduce

When I hover the mouse cursor over the documents in the left sidebar a popup appears that shows the date and time of the last change and of the creation of that note.

Expected result

The popup should show the correct time of creation.

Actual result

While the time of the last change is dispayed correctly, the time of creation always shows up as 1970-01-01 01:00

Environment

  • Operating system: Linux, Ubuntu 20.04.2
  • Obsidian version: 0.11.4

Additional information

This is obviously just a minor nuisance. :slight_smile:

2

what is the creation date reported by your OS?

3

I’m not entirely sure, but I think Linux systems don’t save the creation time of files (which most likely will be the reason for Obsidian to use Unixtime 0 instead).

4

no, linux does save creation date.

5

Well. I can extract the creation time of the files on the filesystem (ext4) level. That time is saved correctly and can be accessed by the os.

6

Can get the creation time from you os the files on your vault?

7

I can’t access the creation time by the OSs gui, but I can access the ext4 “birth” field by using the command stat on the commandline.

8

I have been looking at node.js documentation and reading birth date has been added recently. It’s possible we get this function working properly on linux once we upgrade electron. You could try to download a fresh version of obsidian from the website and see if this solves the issue.

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9

I will give it a shot later today. But I guess I will survive the time not being displayed correctly in the popup. :slight_smile:

Thanks for your help anyway.

11

I had the same issue, and am also using Ubuntu 20.04.2. It was a bigger nuisance for me since I use a plugin that grabs the creation file date from Obsidian. In my case, I was using an NTFS drive to store my files. When I reformatted it to ext4, the original file creation dates appeared in Obsidian.

12

so in ext4 it works but NTFS under fuse doesn’t?

13

Yes, that is what I found.

14

It possibel that NTFS fuse doesn’t support creation time.

15

It might depend on the NTFS version the disc was formatted with. NTFS has always been a bit odd, but ntfs-3g tried to catch up.

Short explanation here: NTFS-3G: Extended Attributes

16

Just for information.

I’m using pCloud on Linux and the network drive it create, as the time of writing, does not return the creation date. It’s not an Obsidian problem.

creation_date_gnome_file

So if you use pCloud you probably have to find another way to store the creation date for your notes.

17

Same problem.
File system: ecryptfs
OS: Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon
Obsidian version: 0.12.19

18

This is a filesystem problem so not much we can do about it.
I think it’s possible that in the future we move to handle creation date/modified date internally.

1 Like
19