Restore Metadata of Documents after Mac OS Upgrade

dreamwriter

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2018
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After an OS upgrade to High Sierra (my sister has an older Mac) she lost all the metadata… … Most importantly giving the date and time… of her documents. She is visually challenged, an organization of her files according to her own inclinations is important to her. Is there any program, as there is on the Windows side, that can restore the metadata?

She has most of her documents in a folder on another machine, and I was wondering if she could simply just copy them onto a thumb drive and dump them on the upgraded machine. of course that may change the metadata.

The best thing of, course, would be a program as on the Windows side, that can restore metadata.
 
Update:

Apparently the problem is different than I thought. According to my friend the metadata has not been changed, and older files do have the proper dates. It's the search function and indexing that has changed or failed since the upgrade to High Sierra.

When she uses spotlight, using a search term that used to generate results reaching back far in time, now such a search only shows recent documents from July. Doesn't this suggest, as some have noted on the web, that the upgrade to High Sierra broke spotlight.

If that's true, is there a simple way to fix it, hopefully automated, or semiautomated, or is there a third party search App that would pick up all the documents, and display them in chronological order?
 
As I wait for someone to respond, is it possible that the upgrade did nothing more than change the parameter of Spotlight search? I don't have my friend's machine with me, and she's a bit of a technophobe, but I'm wondering if going into settings for Spotlight might show that somehow the search has been restricted to only a few folders?
 
This is one of those questions that so specific that only in the event that someone has needed the exact same thing will they have information about it. Which, I can appreciate because those are probably the questions that really need to be asked as all the rest of the stuff is searchable online.

But like I said, I don't really have useful information as a response. Spotlight has its own section in system preferences which allows for changes in search criteria, but nothing to do with date/time. And if you look at preferences for finder, you can choose the breadth that Spotlight searches through. However "Search this Computer" is as relevant as it gets for your friend. Past that I don't really know how to help you here.
The most obvious change that probably needs to happen is that your friend will need to actually know where in the file system these files are and have her own file system so she can find things manually. That may not be ideal and frankly I use Spotlight a lot too as its faster and more convenient than digging through with Finder, but obviously at this point we're trying to figure out solutions or workarounds.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but this is a pretty esoteric piece of information that you need.
 
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