Disabling atime

[Les Mikesell]

John Reiser wrote:
> 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.

Unfortunately those do more damage than good, since incremental backups 
need to be based on ctime changes and resetting the atime updates ctime.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com