Modification dates change when moving/copying between hard-drive and flash

I use a flash drive to store most of my work-related documents on. That way, I have them when I'm at school (on a Windows XP computer) and at home on my Mac OS 10.3.9. I
try to occasionally back-up my flash drive by dragging it's contents to my Mac. Copying in this direction USUALLY retains the appropriate modification date.
However, if I move things from the Mac to the USB drive (I occasionally make changes to a file on the Mac when my flashdrive isn't handy), the modification date changes to the copy/move date. Is there a way around this? It alters the information about the file and sometimes makes a version look newer than another version of a document. When in reality, it’s older--it’s just been moved/copied and the date changed.
I often move things back and forth for backup purposes, but if it keeps changing the dates on it’s own, it’s impossible to tell which is REALLY the
most current copy/version.
Is there a fix so that copying and moving files between volumes does NOT change the modification date of the file?
Powerbook G4--12 in.--1.33 GHz   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Hi, teacher. When my Lexar JumpDrive Secure is formatted as a MS-DOS volume so a PC can read it, the last-mod dates of files that I copy to it are changed to the date and time of copying. When it's formatted as a Mac OS Extended volume, the original last-mod dates are copied to it unchanged. Looks like you can thank Bill Gates for the inconvenience: apparently it's a DOS file system "feature". Don't you wish you could use Windoze all the time?
On second thought, the files really are changed when you write them to a DOS volume, because the DOS file system has no place to store the metadata about your files that a Mac pays attention to and a Windoze box doesn't. So when you write Mac files to a DOS volume, that metadata — which is part of each Mac file — is simply discarded, causing the last-mod date to change.
Message was edited by: eww

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