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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.

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[-] CondorWonder@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 1 points 9 months ago

Ooh, how do you exclude from the db?

[-] CondorWonder@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 months ago

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
[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 1 points 9 months ago
[-] Octavius@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Just out of curiosity: is it that bad if the database is larger? I love to have some history especially for my temperature sensors.

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 1 points 9 months ago

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.

this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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