Would disabling access time logging impact how restic works?

Hi all,

I was wondering whether disabling access time logging on the drive that I back up using restic, by setting the noatime attribute in the relevant file system entry in /etc/fstab, would cause problems to how restic works.

Thanks in advance.

Afaik it shouldn’t effect since restic uses content defined chunking which doesn’t care about attributes. But a dev can correct me :slight_smile:

The fast path when using a parent snapshot will indeed consider metadata, but atime is not checked since it’s usually not relevant – why would you care that a file has been read since the last backup? You would only care if it’s been modified. Hence, restic checks the mtime, not the atime.

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