Original date documents after copy from other library

[Henk Prins]

Hi,

i copied documents from one library of a sharepoint site to another library in another site.

Now i see that the date of the documents (changed) have changed to the date when i copied the documents.

Is the original creation date still available, and can i sort the documents by the original date?

Thanks in advance, 

henk.

[#2]

@Henk Prins Even though you are copying the same document from another library. The new copy document one is still be considered as new created "document" in that library. So you would need not only copy the document it self, instead you will need also to copy from source "Created On" to destination with additional field for example "Original Date". There are many ways to achieve this, you can use SharePoint workflow, 3rd party workflow, or even custom code.

[#3]

@Ade_Budiman_Lim 

Hi, thanks for responding. For know this is all i needed to know.

henk.

[#4]

@Henk Prins Just to be clear and so that you are aware, instead of copying documents from one library to another you can also move them. Moving files between libraries will keep all the original metadata (eg. created by, created date, etc...) . Of course, this way you will not keep a copy in the original document library. If you do need a copy of the files, then yes, each copy will be considered a new document, like @Ade_Budiman_Lim said.

[#5]

Hi OliverR.
Do you know if there is a way to do something similar if i want to move files from a folder in our server to SharePoint?
We are recently moving everybody from local drives to sharepoint. The big problem i am finding, is that when users move the files from their department drives to their sharepoint site, all documents have a new created date and modified date (the day they were moved) instead of the original file date, which means, using retention policies is very difficult, because if I say that all files in folder x should be deleted 5 years from created, it will only be 5 years from when the file was moved (if the file was originally created 4 years ago, but the date change when the file was moved, then it means by the time the file is deleted is going to be 9 years old not 5) is there a way to sort that out?
thanks

[#6]

@MVCuser my suggestion is please consider of using DocAve for this. They have a solution for scenario similar like this.

[#7]

@MVCuser 

Hi, when moving files from an on-premise fileserver or just local PC's you would need to use a migration tool in order to preserve the metadata. Copying the files over manually will just create new files. There are numerous migration software packages available that support moving data over from a fileserver to SharePoint Online. Microsoft's own SharePoint Migration Tool is free to use and does preserve the metadata such as created and modified timestamps, as well as permissions if needed. See more info about SPMT.

Another very widely used software package for data migration is ShareGate. That offers a lot more features than SPMT but it isn't free.