[CentOS] Any downside to mount -o noatime?

Fri Feb 11 02:32:03 UTC 2022
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>

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>