Forum Discussion
OneDrive date modified without changing the file
- This is because of AutoSave in the office clients. They continually save as your view them and they will make changes unfortunately sometimes by just looking at them. The only option you really have is to uncheck the option in your OneDrive client so the files don't open directly with office but open locally. It's sort of explained in this article, but this tick box should keep the files opening the old way and not using the auto save functionality.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-office-applications-to-sync-office-files-that-i-open-8a409b0c-ebe1-4bfa-a08e-998389a9d823?ui=en-US&rs=en-001&ad=US
While I agree that MS did not give enough care to protecting Modified Date in OneDrive (I too use it as a form of version checking and to find recently edited files, and it's way too easy to accidentally make a change and lose the real Modified date forever), I tried and was not able to reproduce the problem you described:
I created a new Word document on a local drive (not on OneDrive). I made changes and saved it, confirmed the Modified Date reflected the time of the changes. Then I opened it a few minutes later without saving any changes and only the Accessed time stamp changed in file Properties, not Modified.
Then, I copied the file to OneDrive. Opened it in Word again by double-clicking from Explorer in the OneDrive folder. I had not turned off Autosave, so it was even set to Autosave, which will provide the most aggressive updates to the Modified value. I moved the cursor around in the Word document and made various selections, but didn't change anything. Then, I closed the file and checked the results.
The file's Created time and date showed the time I created it on OneDrive (not the original creation date), which is how all MS OS's have treated Created since the DOS days -- always reflects the time it was added to a new volume/drive. The Accessed time showed the time when I last used the file. But the Modified date still showed the time stamp of the last actual changes to the file before I moved it to OneDrive.
- Good test. I tried doing the exact same thing. But after I copy the file to OneDrive, when I open the document the quick-access toolbar flashes "Saving" and then "Saved" and then the Date Modified is updated even though I don't manually choose to save the document. Then if I open it a 2nd time it doesn't get saved and Date Modified is not changed. It is just the first opening. There must be some setting in my OneDrive configuration that is causing this. I did not have this problem when my work computer was transitioned to OneDrive.