brain-dump/sysadmin/changing-where-logs-are-stored.md

Changing Where Logs are Stored

I have an SSD that houses my Debian desktop environment. I don't want things like logs chewing through it's life, so I moved the logs to a mounted drive.

The following assumes you already have the harddrive you want to utilize mounted via /etc/fstab as the /storage directory.

Switch to super user

su -

Stop the rsyslog daemon, so no logs are written (and subsequently interrupt the switch)

service rsyslog stop

Make a new directory for the logs, on the mounted /storage drive

mkdir -p /storage/log

Move the original log directory into its new home on the 2nd harddrive

mv /var/log /storage/log

Symlink it, so you don't have to edit a bunch of system config that expects /var/log to exist

ln -s /storage/log /var/log

That's it.

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I also moved ~/Downloads from the SSD to the 2nd hard drive

mkdir /storage/Downloads

Symlink Downloads, too

ln -s /storage/Downloads /home/angela/Downloads

Easy.