Prevent moved Google Drive folder from receiving new timestamps

Question

I have a few systems that sync to the same Google Drive folder. One one of the computers we recently ran out of disk space. I purchased a second larger hard drive and followed this process to move the Google Drive folder to the new hard drive:

1. Unlink the account
2. Move the Google drive folder from the C: to the J: drive
3. Relink account
4. It says it cannot find the folder
5. I pointed it to the new location on the J: drive
6. It begins to resync and compare files
7. Many of the local files started receiving today's date

As soon as I saw it starting to change the timestamp of the local files I again unlinked the account to make sure nothing else was changed.

My questions:

1. Did this change in timestamps happen from me moving the entire directory structure or from Google Drive re-synching again?
2. Is this just changing the timestamp on my local computer or is it changing it in in the cloud as well?
3. If it's changing it in the cloud as well, will it begin to change it on the other machines?

And my most important question:

4. What do I need to do to prevent the timestamps from changing?g

Answer 1

I also had this happen to me once, using Backup and Sync. I also stopped the process, like you did, to prevent the modified date from being changed. It's a bug—I don't know how one solves it. Yes, the modified date is changing on the cloud, and will change on other machines as well.

However, the fewer files you sync, the less chance that something will go wrong. I've experienced other bugs with Backup and Sync, and other Google Drive sync clients. It's best to keep most of your stuff in the cloud, and only selectively sync the files that you need, as you need them. That also reduces data usage costs.