具有时间戳比较的版本控制系统

Question

I've been looking for a software like this for months, but couldn't find it. So, the situation is as following:

1. I have a folder with very old source code files. (My OS is Windows)
2. Each file has it's creation date and modification date (2004-2006 years).
3. This folder is at OneDrive server.

Now, the problem is that few months ago, because of some stupid reason, modification dates of some files were changed to the recent ones (2015 year). The content remained the same. The problem is, that at this moment I have no idea regarding when exactly these files were last changed. And knowing this is important to me. Ok, those are gone. The question is - how do I make sure the rest of files will not change their dates? I am looking for a kind of version/revision control system, which will look not only for changes in content of file, but also for changes in it's attributes. And when I will suddenly notice the change of attributes, I will revert them.

I know that I can archive (backup) entire directory. But that's not a comfortable option - unpacking each time I want to check file and adding each time some possible new files - will be boring.

I know that I can make a snapshots of directories (with ExamDiff Pro) each time I change/add something. But that's also very time consuming and not handy. Also it will not allow me to see previous revisions of files.

So, in a nutshell: tool to preserve all previous versions of file (as much as possible, maybe with comments on who made change) taking into account file attributes: new creation date - means modified file; hidden attribute - means modified file and so on.

I hope you, who read this, shall understand my situation.

Best regards, Yevhen

Answer 1

As suggested in the comments, since you are mostly interested about archiving older files, persisting their modification date, what you could do is use Git to keep track of the changes, and then for each file you backdate a commit that matches its modification date. That way, even if Git will neither track file modification dates nor ensure that the file modification date when checking out matches the commit date, you have a way to persist the modification date and look it up later by checking the revision history.

So essentially, what you would need to do is find all files, sort them by modification date, and then for each file, create a commit with the file modification date as its commit date.

Once that is done, you just need some discipline for future changes that you remember to commit new changes as soon as possible so that their “modification date” is automatically tracked by the commit time.

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In order to create a backdated archive, you could use the following PowerShell script that I came up with quickly. It does exactly what I explained above: It looks for all files recursively in a folder, sorts the files by modification date, and then for each file, it creates a new commit backdated to that file's modification date.

Param([string] $Folder)
Write-Host 'Backdating files in folder' $Folder -ForegroundColor Green

Push-Location $Folder
git init
git commit --allow-empty -m 'Initialize repository'

Write-Host 'Looking for files: ' -NoNewLine -ForegroundColor Blue
$files = Get-ChildItem * -Recurse | ? { !$_.PSIsContainer } | sort LastWriteTime
Write-Host $files.Length -NoNewLine -ForegroundColor Yellow
Write-Host ' files found' -ForegroundColor Blue

Write-Host 'Committing files backdated to their last write time' -ForegroundColor Blue
$files | % {
    git add $_.FullName
    $date = $_.LastWriteTime.ToString('yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')
    $env:GIT_COMMITTER_DATE = $env:GIT_AUTHOR_DATE = $date
    git commit -m ('Backdating: ' + $date)
}

$env:GIT_COMMITTER_DATE = $env:GIT_AUTHOR_DATE = $null
Pop-Location
Write-Host 'Done.' -ForegroundColor Green

Just save that script into a file git-backdate.ps1 (you can also download it here ) and place it somewhere.

Then, open a Windows PowerShell console, and then run the script and pass the directory you want to turn into an archived Git directory as the -Folder parameter.

For example, I put the script onto my desktop, and have a folder gittest there as well. So I do the following:

cd ~\Desktop
.\git-backdate.ps1 -Folder .\gittest

Then, the script should automatically create a repository from it, and create commits for each file. You can cd into it and check with gitk to see a full history.

Of course, you need to have Git for Windows installed in order to run this.