What does archive mean in the properties menu?

[deeya]

What does archive mean in the properties menu? If you right click on a movie or file and go to properties, there is the read only, hidden and archive button at the bottom. I know what the others mean, but what does archive mean?
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[DrHu]

That is a good question; and not quite sure
--other than it is simply an attribute of that file (a property)

In Linux, there is also the file command, since Linux does not actually need file extensions in order to determine which program can open a file

In terminal, check

man file

--or search on the Internet for the file command
http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdln_file.htm

[Biker]

The archive bit is used when doing backups (whether they be full, incremental or differential). When you do a backup, the archive bit is changed to "off" when the file is copied. When the file is modified, the archive bit should turn back "on", letting your backup software know that this file has been modified. This is useful when doing differential or incremental backups.

[DrHu]

Not that sure that this archive attribute of the file system in Linux is that simple, used for backups and cleared or not, it is in windows, since they use an archive bit
http://www.netadmintools.com/art399.html

The ext2 filesystem on GNU/Linux does not have an archive bit, but it does have three different time stamps (creation, modification, and access) that can be used to work around this. The problem, though, is you need an extra process to make decisions on this. Samba works around this by tweaking the owner bits on ext2.

http://www.adsm.org/lists/html/Networke ... 00231.html

Linux/Unix does not have an archive bit, so a Linux client cannot reset it. On Unix clients the backups is performed based on comparing the date of the last successful back at the relevant level and the 'last modified date' in the files inode (also see my letter about the Linux bug with the open (O_CREATE) system call which does not modify mtime, just ctime).

Maybe the reason it is there is due to Samba (CIFS) being included in the default installation of Ubuntu, Mint

[Biker]

Could be. I tend to do full backups of my data, so worrying about the old "archive bit" normally isn't a worry to me. I usually just tar the data directories and write them to a DVD.