K3b: burn a disc but retain original timestamps

Q I use the K3b burning software to burn data discs for my job. When you burn a data disc in K3b the time stamps on all the files are made the same. I need to keep the original time stamp of the files I burn but can't find any way to do that. I was wondering if I could get a little help?

A K3b should do this by default, but it is an option you can change. When the K3b Project window opens, after you click Burn, go to the Filesystem tab and ensure that the box for Preserve File Permissions (Backup) is ticked. You should also tick the Generate Rock Ridge Extensions and Generate Joliet Extensions boxes for full compatibility. After setting the boxes as you want, click the Save User Defaults button to have them applied every time. If this is a regular task, using the same parameters each time, you may find it quicker to use a short shell script to do the job; something like

#!/bin/bash
SOURCE_DIR="~/work/data"
DVD_WRITER="/dev/dvd"
ISO_FILE="~/tmp/image.iso"
mkisofs -rdJ -o $ISO_FILE $SOURCE_DIR &&
cdrecord dev=$DVD_WRITER $ISO_FILE

You need a recent release of CDRecord - or wodim, which includes a CDRecord version that writes DVDs - to use this with a DVD writer, otherwise change the last line to

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z $DVD_WRITER -rdJ $SOURCE_DIR

but note that growisofs will only work with DVDs, not CDs.

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