Getting started

This recipe requires the installation of two third-party modules pywin32 and pytz. All other libraries used in this script are present in Python's standard library. This recipe will primarily use two libraries, the built-in shutil and a third-party library, pywin32. The shutil library is our go-to for copying files within Python, and we can use it to preserve most of the timestamps and other file attributes. The shutil module, however, is unable to preserve the creation time of files it copies. Rather, we must rely on the Windows-specific pywin32 library to preserve it. While the pywin32 library is platform specific, it is incredibly useful to interact with the Windows operating system.

To install pywin32, we need to access its SourceForge page at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/ and download the version that matches our Python installation. To check our Python version, we can import the sys module and call sys.version within an interpreter. Both the version and the architecture are important when selecting the correct pywin32 installer.

In addition to the installation of the pywin32 library, we need to install pytz, a third-party library used to manage time zones in Python. We can install this library using the pip command:

pip install pytz==2017.2