Turning Off Logging

macOS

From Apple’s official documentation:

In some cases, the contents of a volume are sufficiently secret that it is not appropriate to log them. To disable logging on a per-volume basis (for creating a backup volume, for example), you must do the following:

• Create a .fseventsd directory at the top level of the volume.
• Create an empty no_log file in that directory.

So if your volume is mounted at /Volumes/MyDisk, you would create an empty file called /Volumes/MyDisk/.fseventsd/no_log.

Windows

Switched to “No auditing” will disable logging of these events.

Linux

syslog is system wide, so you can’t disable syslog on a per session basis.

However, you can

• copy /etc/rsyslog.conf to /tmp/rsyslog.conf
• edit /tmp/rsyslog.conf to remove unwanted logging
• kill rsyslogd (/etc/init.d/rsyslogd stop)
• run rsyslogd -d -f /tmp/rsyslog.conf for the time of your “session”

at the end of the session

• kill rsyslogd (find process with ps)
• run rsyslog (/etc/init.d/rsyslogd start)

References

[1] Disable logging to syslog, Starkexchange

[2] Windows – How to disable Windows 10 system log

[3] Preventing File System Event Storage on macOS