Reaction of index database to change in access time

Support
1

Yesterday, I realized that the Restic backup of my system increased by about 2GiB in size. restic diff didn’t show many changes, except files in:

/home/felix/.config/syncthing/index-*.db

Earlier, I had reinstalled Immich, which indexed 165,026 images. I assume, this updated their atime.

But why does this affect Syncthing, and why this massive change of the database files?

I have since excluded /home/felix/.config/syncthing/index-*.db from Restic. To my understanding, it’s not vital to have a backup of the database. The backup is for rare worst case events like disk failure.

2

Syncthing doesn’t look at or care about atime. Something else happened.

3

Thanks! And, as I just checked, Immich does not modify atime.