I have about 20 years of data that has been stored on NTFS drives. I've used various solutions over the years to preserve the NTFS timestamp for date created. I love being able to check when a file was originally created as a point of nostalgia, so this is an important feature to me.

I'm at a point where I need to scale up again, but hosting all of my data on my Windows workstation has become...burdensome, to say the least.

So I've been looking at various NAS solutions. However, in my experience linux doesn't play well with preserving time created (crtime) across file systems.

This is the one thing that has held me back. I get a lot of confused looks when I explain what it is I'm trying to do and I'm hesitant to use Synology or TrueNAS. These options could work for holding my data from now moving forward, but not for what I have up to now.

I was hoping someone could explain what my options are for accomplishing this goal or whether they've even had any experience preserving this metadata across non-NTFS file systems?