On Wed, Feb 09, 2022 at 02:09:44PM -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:> I'd like to reduce the wear-and-tear on my SSDs and eliminate the > unnecessary metadata writes on my backup media that only slow down > the backup process. So I want to add noatime to all my mounts. Is > there any downside to this? > > At one time I remember atime being useful for tmpwatch, which > removes files in /tmp that haven't been accessed in a week or two. > But I can live without that feature.relatime has been the default for a long time -- that only updates atime once per some reasonable timeperiod. The wear and tear from that is negligible and you can still get a basic idea of when files where accessed. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> Fedora Project Leader
--On Thursday, February 10, 2022 8:03 PM -0500 Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:> relatime has been the default for a long time -- that only updates atime > once per some reasonable timeperiod. The wear and tear from that is > negligible and you can still get a basic idea of when files where > accessed.According to the man page for mount, relatime updates atime whenever mtime or ctime are updated, or if neither has been updated in the last 24 hours. Which is still prohibitive if you're doing an incremental (rsync) backup and checking file contents on the "full" backup weekly or monthly. The only apps I've found that need atime are tmpwatch and biff, neither of which I use.