--On Thursday, February 10, 2022 8:49 PM -0500 Jon LaBadie <jcu at labadie.us> wrote:> atime updates that occur when {m,c}time are updated add > no additional burden.Understood. If that's the only time it happened, I would be happy with that.> So you are concerned about a single "possible" inode update > once a day?I'm using BackupPC to do rsync-based backups of all my systems. The "incremental" backups look only at size and timestamp changes. The less-frequent "full" backups checksum all my files. That means an extra write for every file that gets checked. I'd love to have a version of relatime that only did the first kind of update, when ctime or mtime changed but not when 24 hours had passed.
Once upon a time, Kenneth Porter <shiva at sewingwitch.com> said:> I'm using BackupPC to do rsync-based backups of all my systems. The > "incremental" backups look only at size and timestamp changes. The > less-frequent "full" backups checksum all my files. That means an > extra write for every file that gets checked.Well, not really. atime writes would get batched just like any other write, and filesystems have inode metadata grouped together, so it'd be more like one flush of a few inode metadata blocks for a whole lot of atime updates. Unless you had zero other writes (in which case, why back up), this will still be lost in the noise of total writes. Any old SSD will handle that just fine for many years to come. -- Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>
On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 06:22:55PM -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:>--On Thursday, February 10, 2022 8:49 PM -0500 Jon LaBadie <jcu at labadie.us> >wrote: > >> atime updates that occur when {m,c}time are updated add >> no additional burden. > >Understood. If that's the only time it happened, I would be happy with that. > >> So you are concerned about a single "possible" inode update >> once a day? > >I'm using BackupPC to do rsync-based backups of all my systems. The >"incremental" backups look only at size and timestamp changes. The >less-frequent "full" backups checksum all my files. That means an extra >write for every file that gets checked. > >I'd love to have a version of relatime that only did the first kind of >update, when ctime or mtime changed but not when 24 hours had passed.From an earlier post: "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." Are you reading that as "atime gets updated every 24 hrs"? If so you are missing "if needed". I.e. if the file's data blocks have been read. Checking time-stamps and sizes are not operations that cause atime updates. Those are inode operations, not data reads. -- Jon H. LaBadie jcu at labadie.us