Daily Blog #541: Solution Saturday 11/17/18

Hello Reader,
          This week a new champion emerges and enters the winners circle. Congratulations to Oleg Skulkin who grabbed a win this week with his testing! Make sure to come back tomorrow to see next weeks' challenge for your chance at $100!

The Challenge:

We've tested what happens for copies to NTFS drives. Now let's change it up. What changes occur to files when you copy and paste as well as cut and paste to a FAT32 drive

The Winning Answer:

Olegl Skulkin

I created 6 files, 1 DOCX, 1 TXT, 1 JPG on an NTFS volume for copying, and 1 DOCX, 1 TXT, 1 JPG for cutting and pasting. I used Windows 10 both for copying and cutting, and a freshly formatted FAT32 flash drive.

I created two folders on the flash drive – “copy - paste” and “cut - paste”. I copied and pasted first three files to “copy - paste”, and next three files to “cut - paste”. Then I imaged the flash drive with FTK Imager (4.1.1.1) and used Autopsy (4.9.0) to examine the image.

Here are the results:

The DOCX file saved its Modified timestamp, lost time for Accessed, and its Created timestamp changed. Despite the fact I used UTC as the timezone in Autopsy, the timestamps were shown in UTC +3. 

The same results were observed for the TXT file: 

And for the JPG file:

As for cutting and pasting, the DOCX file saved its Modified and Created timestamps, but lost time for Accessed timestamp (again, timestamps are in UTC +3):

The same happened with the TXT file:

And with the JPG file:

Results 

Copy – paste: 

Modified	Accessed	Created
Unchanged	Changed	Changed

Cut – paste 

Modified	Accessed	Created
Unchanged	Changed	Unchanged