--On Thursday, February 10, 2022 8:15 PM -0600 Chris Adams linux@cmadams.net wrote:
Unless you never write to the disk, that will still be lost in the noise of writes.
Consider a weekly backup of /usr with checksumming of the contents. A partition that only changes with updates, so in principle it could be mounted read-only except when I yum update. Although of course since it's not SUPPOSED to change, an incremental backup should only be done after that yum update. The main value I can see with atime on /usr is to identify trash that I'm not using and that should be uninstalled.
But if it still bothers you, use rsync --open-noatime.
That would be handy if I actually needed atime! I hadn't noticed that one. Although I'm reading that the containing directory's atime does get updated.