Help! Bitdefender resets my file modified dates when it runs

onewombat

I installed bitdefender antivirus plus on my windows pc last week and every time I run a scan, all the file modified dates change. This is troubling as I frequently use the dates to find the files I’m looking for. Is there a way to prevent this or is this a feature of the software that can’t be avoided?

Thanks for any assistance

Ken

Alexandru_BD

Hello @onewombat,

That's normal, Bitdefender will access the folders in order to scan them. I'm unaware of a way to go around this..

Regards,

Alex

MindlessLump

I'm having the same issue.

To @Alexandru_BD's comment, accessing files is different than modifying them. The "Date modified" field in Windows only gets updated when the OS is told that the file is edited. Opening and reading a file does not necessarily edit it.

I think it's fair to assume that the Bitdefender scan isn't actually editing all my files as it scans them, but the problem is that it's telling the OS it's editing them, so the "Date modified" timestamps frequently get updated. This is particularly annoying for the files that I have backed up to OneDrive, since it tries to re-sync hundreds of thousands of "changed" files after every Bitdefender scan.

Alexandru_BD

Hi @MindlessLump and thanks for joining us here.

I think this requires a closer look, you could be on to something here. May I suggest contacting the Support teams for a more informed opinion? They should be able to offer assistance here. You can get in touch with the Bitdefender engineers by choosing one of the contact channels listed here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/help/

State your contact reason, then choose from the available contact channels, chat, phone and email/ticket. Chat would be the fastest way to reach them.

Let us know how it goes, I'm curious if there are ways to prevent this from happening.

Thanks,

Alex

MindlessLump

I contacted support, and I was able to solve the issue.

Unfortunately, the solution was a clean Windows 11 install. Less extreme solutions like reinstalling Bitdefender or doing an in-place upgrade to repair the Windows install didn't work, but ever since doing a clean install, I have not experienced this issue further. The support team also was unable to replicate the issue, even when I sent a zip file with some of the affected files for them to test with; this helps confirm the issue was specific to my Windows install, rather than an issue with Bitdefender.

Alexandru_BD

Hello and thank you for following up with your findings here. I'm glad to hear the situation has been resolved in a positive manner. 👍️

Regards,

Alex

Monks AL

There is a way to revert your files without a clean install of Windows 11. You can modify your files by using SKTimeStamp to alter the files to the correct time because Bitdefender doesn't change the created date of the file. The only main issue with this is that depending on how many files you have it may take a while. Other than that thats the solution I found that worked.