Hi All,
Im going through an exercise of trying to identify stale data across my estate and it seemed like using the ‘Last Accessed Date/Time’ might be a good idea. Turns out it’s not. Seems like I disabled Atime many moons ago (might even be default now) so thats not helpful. Therefore I decided I might consider enabling it for future assistance but in testing opening a file via SMB doesn’t seem to change the value however if I open the file from the CLI it does therefore I figured its potentially a samba thing.
Appreciate any thoughts or ideas.
SMB clients can manually specify the atime to set on the file. Generally it’s mutable and so not a great choice for tracking things down.
Good question. I tried that but when reaching out to customers saying do you need x y and z as it hasn’t been modified for ages often they would say yeah we read that every day for our work. Ideally I just want to identify stale data that hasn’t been read for say a year or more.
mtime is also mutable from userspace.
Interesting. Do you know why it is that when a file is read via SMB access it doesn’t register an updated Atime yet when read from the CLI on the TrueNAS box it does?
