File creation date disappears when relocating masters in Aperture

Dear all

I am trailing the latest copy of Aperutre. I have photos stored locally on my hard drive and also on an external hard drive. These are set to be referenced masters. Last night I relocated some photos and videos from my external hard drive to my internal hard drive. After doing that I noticed this evening that the creation dates and times of my files were blank in the file system. When I look in terminal using ls -lU it gives the dates as 1 Jan 1970 for every photos and video which is incorrect.

Can anyone else replicate and confirm this and should I file I bug report?

I rely on the file system creation dates as a secondardy backup, especially as some years ago I accidentally amended the date and times of some photos incorrectly so overtime I can using the file system creation dates to amend theses. I can't do this if they do not exist. I do not see why the creation dates need to be removed. I can see no justification for this behavouire

I haven't purchased Aperture yet but there is always the possibity I may give up using it, if problems such as this keep coming up. I already have an issue with writing metadata back to the master. That updates the creation and modification dates to the current date and time without an option to turn this off. One might be able to justify the modification date changing but I can see no justification for the creation date changing. I can get around that problem by exporting the metadata to an XMP file and then using EXIFTOOL to update the metadata and then rereading from the masters in Aperture.

I guess a work around for my latest problem is to move the masters outside of aperutre and then relocate them. I did read on another message forum where someone was saying to a user why would you ever wish to do that. Well I guess I've just found an excellent reason. I am amazed at this given that Preview takes photos and videos from cameras and even extracts the JPEG previews, whilst still retaining the original camera modification and creation dates.

Thankfully I back up all my files so I can recover from this by restoring the files form back up. However it is another step I didn't want. My reason for moving to Aperture was to making the titling of photos and videos far more easy but it seems everytime I try to do this their is something fighting back to stop me.

Kind regards