❯ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 4G in the file system.
and after truncating to 2 weeks
❯ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 693.7M in the file system.
thanks for the reminder
i mean in general do we need all the old journal? i would say 3 months okay but everything older?
journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 120M in the file system.
stat /var/log/pacman.log
File: /var/log/pacman.log
Size: 163090 Blocks: 328 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: 253,0 Inode: 12320778 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2025-06-29 09:40:40.445717666 +0100
Modify: 2025-07-01 19:56:38.986706237 +0100
Change: 2025-07-01 19:56:38.986706237 +0100
Birth: 2025-06-29 09:40:40.445717666 +0100
Well, I didn’t had major issues within the last weeks… and I really don’t care about the logs being kept for longer than really necessary. Okay, 2 days might be quiet a short span of time. But on the other hand I didn’t had anything relevant which might be revisited later on… several months of logs seems to be excessive in my use case.
$ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 1.5G in the file system.
$ sudo journalctl --vacuum-time 2d
Vacuuming done, freed 1.4G of archived journals from /var/log...
journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 3.9G in the file system.
[svartiz@doesntmatter ~]$ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 505.5M in the file system.
cool was not knowing this one..
highest we saw here for now?
show stat /var/log/pacman.log too 
❯ stat /var/log/pacman.log
File: /var/log/pacman.log
Size: 748655 Blocks: 1472 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: 259,4 Inode: 17826377 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2025-05-12 15:44:23.019657157 -0400
Modify: 2025-06-30 16:08:47.124664778 -0400
Change: 2025-06-30 16:08:47.124664778 -0400
Birth: 2025-05-12 15:44:23.019657157 -0400
Do I win the prize?
Okay i will send stickers to the winner
i would check journal from may to jily 4 GB is huge.. may something is filling it up that is not working properly
[jp@jp14 ~]$ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 412.3M in the file system.
[jp@jp14 ~]$
yeah it was tianji docker container that went insane. I had fixed that this weekend when I kept hearing the hard drive heads moving. Didn’t realize it was writing to journal too.
journalctl --disk-usage
Journal file /var/log/journal/0f804eb3cd2545268be68970f408ebaa/system@000631f83a943943-d4d48c3298d255e1.journal~ is truncated, ignoring file.
Archived and active journals take up 3.9G in the file system.
My Arch system I used for building Ezarcher ISOs is running with 8M of journal size. Is that good? 
Mine is about 350 MB. Near to the sizes reported by @Noodly and @UncleSpellbinder. Have to catch up on and backup and archiving of old journal entries.
@joekamprad for desktop maybe 1-3 months of journal logs should be enough. But on some servers, I have seen logs being archived upto 6 months or more. These archived logs were kept in a separate NFS mount. The reason given was for forensic and regulatory purposes. Still am skeptical on both of the points.
stat /var/log/pacman.log
Datei: /var/log/pacman.log
Größe: 9502813 Blöcke: 18584 EA Block: 4096 reguläre Datei
Gerät: 259/2 Inode: 31850581 Verknüpfungen: 1
Zugriff: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Zugriff: 2024-05-18 10:39:42.514734771 +0200
Modifiziert: 2025-07-01 22:09:31.142114534 +0200
Geändert: 2025-07-01 22:09:31.142114534 +0200
Geburt: 2024-05-18 10:39:42.514734771 +0200
I limit my journal size.
sintan: ~ ) journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 130.2M in the file system.