S3Drive - Media backup - ability to preserve Date Modified with S3 backend (Backblaze B2)

Hi #support I am evaluating s3drive solution, and it seems quite nice so far, except that my wanted use case is: being able to browse photos on macOS, given the correct Date Modified timestamp in the mount folder. All the photos that I backed up are time-stamped with the upload date, not the date the photo was captured. Would it be possible to:

have Media Backup store files in an S3 bucket with a metadata property representing the photo capture timestamp
have macOS mount (with rclone I guess) interpret this metadata property and render the files Date Modified with that photo capture timestamp

I think it is all related to the rclone configuration: https://rclone.org/s3/#modification-times-and-hashes Thanks

Amazon S3

Rclone docs for Amazon S3

11:33 AM

Maybe changing configuration from native S3 to rclone based would help?

Hi @DrInvincibilis, In principle S3Drive uploads mod time (for both S3 and Rclone endpoints), as long as its available on the file level. Format that's used for storing mod time is cross-compatible between S3Drive/Rclone, so you can switch tools and in principle everything shall be preserved. Dates displayed on the listing (for S3 endpoints) correspond to the upload date (that's the nature of S3 protocol), not file modification time, but if you use "Properties" on an uploaded file then you shall be able to see the File (mtime) (please see the screenshot). If you then download that file from S3Drive to your FS either using Download or Sync or any other functionality then original modtime shall be preserved based on that mtime header. Having said that, I am not quite sure whether Media backup has access to photo modification time. We'll need to check that actually. I presume you refer to iOS? (edited)

Hi @Tom thanks for the prompt answer. My issue is:

Media Backup in iPhone
s3Drive mount in macOS
all the photos backed up are having both Date Created and Date Modified as the upload date not the photo capture date
mtime in the Backblaze browser is set to upload date

The goal is as above: photos in the mount folder have Date Modified as the date of photo capture. (edited)

11:46 AM

wonder when I switch to rclone config would this have an effect https://rclone.org/s3/#modification-times with rclone configuration is the sort of "rclone" library invoked underneath?

Amazon S3

Rclone docs for Amazon S3

DrInvincibilis

wonder when I switch to rclone config would this have an effect https://rclone.org/s3/#modification-times with rclone configuration is the sort of "rclone" library invoked underneath?

Feel free to give it a go, but I doubt it will help. I will pass that that to our team to check. We may find some workaround or quick fix to make media backup respect mod time. (edited)

Thanks looking forward to solutions or workarounds

11:54 AM

...given the S3 metadata property as in rclone config I can set e.g. lifecycle rules for cleaning/archiving etc

DrInvincibilis

...given the S3 metadata property as in rclone config I can set e.g. lifecycle rules for cleaning/archiving etc

Which flag/config you refer to specifically? In most cases lifecycle rules are set not on the config level, but on the bucket level (through the UI of your provider).

This one: X-Amz-Meta-Mtime is not set by Media Backup I guess. And should be the Photo original date. (edited)

DrInvincibilis

This one: X-Amz-Meta-Mtime is not set by Media Backup I guess. And should be the Photo original date. (edited)

Thanks, that's helpful, we'll check that out and see what we can do.

I've actually had chance to check it myself on latest iOS and once file was uploaded using media backup, mtime was set correctly. Not quite sure why it's not set in your case.