As a Home Assistant noob, there’s some things that I’m just destined not to learn until I experience them and one such thing is that I should disable things I don’t use on devices I use. I have a bunch of presence sensors in my house and they were essentially spamming my logs with the motion state, something I never need as I only ever need to know whether a room is occupied or not.
Anyway, I didn’t think anything of the log spam until I did a backup, in two weeks my backup went from 5mb to 0.5gb I was like WTF? I digress… a quick search said it was safe to delete and it would be recreated automatically, so I did and now it’s back to 5mb and obviously I disabled all of the extraneous logging elements disabled. Since disabling wasn’t enough.
Just sharing what I learned.
For those devices that are very chatty you can specifically exclude them from being stored in the database. I then created template sensors that let me filter the results so I’m not spamming the database, only storing data I want. I do find the mm-wave sensors to be particularly bad, but I’ve also found Tuya-based air quality sensors to spam the logs too.
Ooh, how do you exclude from the db?
Recorder integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/recorder/
The simplest way in configuration.yaml is something like:
recorder: exclude: entities: - sensor.chatty1 - sensor.chatty2
Thank you
Just out of curiosity: is it that bad if the database is larger? I love to have some history especially for my temperature sensors.
I have two temperature sensors and keep their data, but I was getting a tonne of spam from my presence sensors which meant that my database was 2GB and growing. That level of IO would quickly kill my SD.