When you move a group to an external folder (in an indexed location) the new folder created in the filesystem doesn’t inherit the creation date of the DT group; its creation date is set to the time the move is performed.
The creation date of the DT group remains untouched so in the end the two dates are different.
Is it possible to set the new folder date to the same value of the group in DT?
That behaviour is expecially annoying in one case i.e. when the group to be moved is automatically created by DT during mail import to collect all messages belonging to the same thread/conversation.
In that case the creation date of the group is wisely set by DT to the date of the oldest mail in the conversation and it’s important to keep the same date in the correspondent folder created during the “move to external folder”.
What would you do for readers who don’t want the behavior you suggested? I suspect that if “preserve create date” was the default process it will make problems for others. Have you considered using an AppleScript and/or Hazel to achieve the customization you’re looking for?
Yes, in principle it’s possible that a user prefers to record the date+time at which he/she moved the group instead of preserving the creation date of the group.
In practice I can’t figure out a real case in which such info could be useful (a specific search? job activities tracking?) but I’m sure someone can prove me wrong.
Remaining in the field of principles, when metadata for a DT record have an exact equivalent for the file in the filesystem (e.g. filename, tags, dates, spotlight comment, etc) I would prefer the two of them to stay the same.
As you suggested I arranged a Keyboard Maestro macro that takes care of adjusting the folders’ dates but would anyway ask DTechnologies guys to consider my request.