ONTAP Discussions

Turning on/off updating of last access date for folders

MagneTismen
7,012 Views

Background:

We have developed an application that scans NetApp file systems, gathering meta-data about all the files it scans. The scan results are stored in an SQL database that is queried from a user portal to give insight into that user's data consumption patterns.

 

Current problem:

In a particular customer environment (7-mode 8.1.2) we discovered that during this scan, the last access date of all the folders are being updated. This is the first time we've come across this behaviour - in another occasion we saw that having a specific Antivirus program running at the same time would update the last access date of all the files, but this time it is only for the folders that are affected.

 

We have been able to reproduce this in a Windows Server environment by turning this feature on/off with the following command:

  fsutil behavior query disablelastaccess - shows the current setting for last access dates for folders.

  fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1/0 - enables or disables the last access date updating for folders.

 

Question:

Is there a similar setting in the NetApp environment, and if so, is this limited to ontap versions?

 

We've tried looking into the 7-mode/cDOT documentation here on the NetApp community but could not find any setting that suggested this behaviour (it might well be that I'm not very good at looking into the documentation). As we have seen this in one environment but not in others we first want to rule out if there is a particular setting that allows us to change this or not before proceeding in looking into a potential code-level issue or the interoperability with other software.

 

I'm happy to provide more information if needed.

3 REPLIES 3

aborzenkov
6,884 Views

vol options volume no_atime_update on

MagneTismen
6,876 Views

Thank you for your quick response, we will try to verify this in our NetApp simulator, I'll get back to you if this worked or not.

 

EDIT: This option changes the last access date for both folders and files. Do you know if there is a setting only for the folders but not for the files?

bruphi10
6,130 Views

@aborzenkov wrote:

vol options volume no_atime_update on



Hi,

I would like to avoid windows 7 searches on netapp 8.2 shares being updating last-access date/time.
In fact, with Enterprise Vault 11, we use this date to archive files being accessed since 1 year ago.
Searches done on the shares affects this date and old files become young thus being not archived by FSA task.

 

Is there any known solution for that ?

 

Thank in advance

 

Bruno

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