Ubuntu – How to automatically delete old apache error log files

There's no single answer. Factors to consider:

• legal requirements for retention or destruction
• company policies for retention and destruction
• how long the logs are useful
• what questions you're hoping to answer from the logs
• how much space they take up

I've got some logs that roll over in days, and others that are kept for years.

I tend to keep access logs longer (in some cases, forever, once I've stripped identifying information out of them) than error logs as in theory, I don't need them once I've fixed the problems.

I keep some other debugging logs (showing user activity, how they're interacting with the system, etc.) around so we can see how things change with each version.

...

And this reminds me of anecdote when I worked for a university -- management brought in an outside consultant to do a third-party review of the webserver we were building. I was told to hand over 3 months of logs for them to review if we had sized the system appropriately. I knew that was a sign they didn't know what the hell they were doing, as universities are cyclic -- webserver load trended up over time, but with spikes at the beginning of each year, finals time, etc.

Couple things to consider: first, make sure you don't have your logs on your system partition if you have control over the server at all. Ideally, have separate partitions (ideally drives, but at least partitions) for holding the C: drive (system files and page file), and your IIS content and logfiles. In terms of rotation, there are a bunch of people out there who have written scripts that can help with this, though I agree with the answer above: if this is not normal behavior, someone is trying to "tumble" your site in some manner. Script I use: www.scriptinganswers.com/vault/Files%20and%20Folders/ -> DelFileByExtAndAge.vbs