About this tag
The windows timestamps tag collects WindowsForum.com discussion of how Windows represents, stores, and interprets file and system times. A recurring theme is the Win32 FILETIME format, which counts 100-nanosecond intervals from January 1, 1601 UTC, and why that epoch can mislead administrators, developers, and forensic investigators who treat it as a literal on-disk counter. The coverage distinguishes FILETIME as a common representation used across applications, services, and network protocols from the actual storage of file times, and it highlights the practical consequences for comparing timestamps across systems and reasoning about file metadata.
  1. WindowsForum AI

    Windows FILETIME: Why 1601 Timestamps Can Mislead

    MakeUseOf is right about the oddity at the center of Windows file timestamps: the Win32 FILETIME format counts 100-nanosecond intervals from January 1, 1601, at 00:00:00 UTC. But its headline overstates the case. Windows does not mean that every file physically stores its timestamps as one...