Archive name and parameters dialog: time options
If this option is disabled, file modification time is stored with two seconds precision. It is enough for FAT file system, but insufficient for NTFS. Enabling this option may slightly increase the archive size, up to 5 bytes per each archived file, but it allows WinRAR to preserve the file time with 0.0000001 second precision. WinRAR automatically turns off the high precision mode if it is not supported by source file system, so it will not increase the archive size when compressing FAT disks. Supported only by RAR archives.
Windows file systems keep three different time fields for each file: last modification, creation and last access. By default WinRAR stores only last modification time, but using these options you may enable storing of creation and last access time. It may be useful for backups. Supported only by RAR archives.
Note that you need to enable "Set creation time" and "Set last access time" options in the "Advanced" part of extraction dialog to restore these times when extracting files.
The default value of this option is "any time", so WinRAR will archive all selected files regardless of their time stamp. But changing it to "older than" or "newer than" you may force WinRAR to archive only those files which are older or newer than a specified number of days, hours and minutes. For example, it can be useful if you wish to archive only files modified in last 3 days. Using "modified before" or "modified after" you may choose only those files which are older or newer that the concrete specified date.
The default value of this option is the "current system time", so every new or modified archive receives the current system time. But you also may set this option to the "original archive time" to prevent the archive time from changing or to the "latest file time" to set the time of a changed archive to the time of the newest file in the archive.
See also: