I have been a happy user of avast! for several years and am currently running version 4.8 Professional.
I notice that my data logs are forever increasing in size. My setup log is some 29,854 KB ???
How do I go about making these logs just record data for just the last few days or the last month?
You can set the max log file size in Program Settings, Logging, Log file size limit, I have mine set at 128KB Though the setup.log in the Setup folder doesn’t seem to conform (nor does the one in the Data\Log\ folder) to that as mine is 1,455KB dating from 09 July 2008 when it was installed on my new system.
I would imagine that you could edit using notepad (Cut some of the content) or rename the setup.log file/s to setupold.log that should generate a new log on reboot and then delete the renamed file. However, to do that you would first need to disable the self-defence module do the task and enable it again.
I just did a quick test to cut everything out of my setup.log files leaving only the last few days worth of data. I guess you have to be careful to have the start of the file at the start of a new day and no blank lines before that, so perhaps the rename option would be better as you can undo the rename if required.
avast housekeeping is not good… they should improve it in version 5: log sizes, crash dumps, reports, etc.
I’ll typically trim setup.log (there’s two of them, in separate sub-folders) down to the last couple of weeks or so, once or twice a month. I doubt if I’d ever need more than that for typical trouble-shooting.
And as David noted, you’ll have to temporarily turn off the self-protection to save the edited file.
It would be good if the log file settings in the avast! Program Settings, Logging section also applied to the setup.log files, it would save a whole lot of hassle…