timeshift wakes (spins up) its usb drive every hour, even when not backing up

[oneEyedCharlie]

timeshift wakes (spins up) its usb drive every hour, even when not backing up. For example, set timeshift to back up weekly. After you do that, every hour, on the hour, timeshift is called by cron to do a check. That check, for whatever reason, spins up the usb drive from sleep. It looks like this in Mint Cinnamon 19.1's logs:

09:00:01 cron: (root) CMD (timeshift --check --scripted)

This is a problem because it needlessly spins up the usb backup drive 167 extra times per week, wearing it out prematurely.

The timeshift version is 18.9.1.

[erikfdev]

Although we should not exaggerate the wear-out of this hourly spin-up (Western Digital and Seagate specs indicate 600 000 load/unload cycles), I personally agree with you that this is not necessary.

The developers could get inspiration from the BackInTime backup program: it uses a timestamp file in the home directory (in this case /home/root) keeping track of the moment of last backup. This way the program avoids access to the backup volume.

[jakewarren]

Just sharing the workaround I came up with:

# edit the cron job to fit your desired schedule (for my needs I set it once per day)
sudo vim /etc/cron.d/timeshift-hourly

# make the file immutable so that timeshift isn't able to re-write the script to the default version
sudo chattr +i /etc/cron.d/timeshift-hourly

Personally I'm not necessarily concerned about the extra wear on the drive, I just got annoyed listening to my external drive spin up every hour. :smile:

[oneEyedCharlie]

Interesting solution, Jake. In the end, I decided to simply not do hourlies.