checking the history of a file

yo
I was away recently and someone took my laptop and accessed a lot of files. There was one important one I didnt want accessed and I want to check was anything done with this file (if it was found) in the days i was away. Unfortunately when I was trying to check it out myself I thought I could see this info if I looked in properties, but now it says the last time the file was accessed was when I clicked on properties, so Im not sure if it was accessed in the few days previous.

Is there an easy way to go about this or do I need some software to do it?

any advice appreciated

Snowbat

Checking the properties of a file in Windows XP does seem to updade the access time so the information you want has been overwritten.

For your future reference, you can use the dir command with the TA switch in a command prompt to see this information without updating it.

C:\Documents and Settings\Snowbat\Desktop>dir /TA oceanfree.txt
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 8825-8019

 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings\Snowbat\Desktop

09/12/2006  20:09               355 oceanfree.txt
               1 File(s)            355 bytes
               0 Dir(s)     281,804,800 bytes free

(edit: or just dir /TA for a directory listing with last accessed times)

trout

what type of file is it ? some applications store extended information in the file itself or application logs ... also, depending on your OS, you may find eventviewer useful (start -> run -> eventvwr)

if you do want to keep private stuff private, there are several ways of doing so, from the mundane (password protect) to encryption tools such as TrueCrypt ... linkeh http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlTrueCrypt.html ... while you may not prevent someone really determined to open your files, at least you will foil 99% of snoopers

good luck!

thanks for the info, its a notepad file. what I did do which may clear things up is i went into my documents, view, explore bar and then history. This gave me a list of files that were accessed on previous days. The important one wasnt on the list so it should be all good as long as the history thing is accurate

trout

Deleted User wrote:

thanks for the info, its a notepad file. what I did do which may clear things up is i went into my documents, view, explore bar and then history. This gave me a list of files that were accessed on previous days. The important one wasnt on the list so it should be all good as long as the history thing is accurate

you should be okay so ... if you have data you absolutely want to keep private, maybe a notepad file isn't the best place!
look into the various freeware encryption tools and invest a little time ... it's worth it for your piece of mind

Capt'n Midnight

does antivirus software change the last access timestamp ?
also turning it off speeds up your hard drive slightly since you don't to need to write to the file index