Les Mikesell wrote:
I'm not sure anyone has mentioned what are probably the biggest uses of atime:
(2) as an indication that files have never been used and can probably be deleted. Since most backup operations act as a read, this tends to not be very useful.
Serious backup systems (programs designed for the purpose) save and restore the old value of atime. 'tar' has --atime-preserve. cpio has --reset-access-time.