On 2/10/22 18:15, Chris Adams wrote: > Unless you never write to the disk, that will still be lost in the noise > of writes. But if it still bothers you, use rsync --open-noatime. I'd have suggested that, except that as far as I can tell, it doesn't apply to directories. Even with that option, the directory crawl results in lots of writes to both the source and destination volume (which stinks if the backup volume is slow, as they often are).