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I'm working on an app that cares about inodes and various metadata. A few customers have reported bugs and in investigation I'm seeing that the inode and created date for at least 1 folder are different after the Windows 10 Creators update. After a little bit of Googling I found a similar report (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/TXV6ngZcVJ4) against Google Drive, another app that cares about iNodes.

Any idea what is causing this? Is this a bug in the Win 10 Creators Update? It seems like a bug if folder/file inodes are changing.

greenhat
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    Do you mean file ID numbers? There are no inodes in native Windows filesystems. File IDs should be permanent in NTFS, but they can change for FAT filesystems, which don't have a file ID attribute but instead calculate the ID based on the first cluster of the parent directory and the byte offset of the entry. Defragmenting a volume or renaming files can change file IDs in a FAT filesystem. – Eryk Sun Nov 21 '17 at 13:48
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    Yes, thanks for the question/clarification. I do mean file IDs, as returned by GetFileInformationByHandle. Our app is cross platform so I tend to think in terms of inodes which isn't precise. We do check that the FS is NTFS so they should be permanent as you say. In the past we've noticed that the file IDs can change (eg. with the upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10). We found that the creation time at least remained the same in that case. Now, with Win10 Creators update both the file ID and the creation time seem to change, sometimes. – greenhat Dec 22 '17 at 16:59

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