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Ashwin Nanda's avatar
Ashwin Nanda
Copper Contributor
Oct 15, 2017

How to preserve original/organic properties of a file as/after it is uploaded into SharePoint onilne

I am having a hard time trying to find a method, without the use of a 3rd party application, to preserve the organic/original properties of a file being uploaded into SharePoint Onilne document libra...
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harstonhome's avatar
harstonhome
Copper Contributor
Aug 01, 2022
I know this is an older thread, but has anyone found a solution to this issue? I need to create a data retention policy for files based on the created date. Unfortunately, the original created date was changed after the files were migrated to SharePoint.
Paul_HK_de_Jong's avatar
Paul_HK_de_Jong
Iron Contributor
Aug 02, 2022

harstonhome 

Have the files already been uploaded to SharePoint?
If the files have not yet been uploaded you can use 3rd party tools like https://directory.collab365.com/listing/slim-companion-explorer/to extract the original create date stored within the files and capture the values into a SharePoint column during uploading. This works for most common file formats such as Office (e.g. docx), emails, pdf, jpg, binary Office files (doc, ...), audio files, video files, ...

If the files are already present in SharePoint things become more complicated. You will need to look for applications/scripts that can extract metadata from files stored in SharePoint and then update the SharePoint columns. For emails there are solutions (e.g., https://www.slimapplications.com/product/bulkmetadatamanager/) but you will probably have a mix of different file formats.

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