how and when to delete old neo4j transaction log files

Question

My local Neo4j has a lot of transaction logs in data/graph.db:

251M  3 Sep 16:44 neostore.transaction.db.0
255M  3 Sep 20:01 neostore.transaction.db.1
255M  3 Sep 23:20 neostore.transaction.db.2
251M  4 Sep 19:34 neostore.transaction.db.3
250M  4 Sep 22:16 neostore.transaction.db.4
134M  5 Sep 05:02 neostore.transaction.db.5
16B  5 Sep 09:57 neostore.transaction.db.6
16B  7 Sep 16:44 neostore.transaction.db.7

I'm backing the graph.db folder up (I have stopped the neo4j instance) in order to reload in another offsite instance, so it would be nice to reduce the folder size.

1. What methods are there to control these logs?
2. How do I check if a given neostore.transaction.db.X file has been successfully processed?
3. Is it safe to remove older processed files?

Logical logs are referred to in the docs, which I believe are the same files: http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/configuration-logical-logs.html

In conf/neo4j.properties I've changed the option keep_logical_logs to 100M size:

# Keep logical logs, helps debugging but uses more disk space, enabled for
# legacy reasons To limit space needed to store historical logs use values such
# as: "7 days" or "100M size" instead of "true".
keep_logical_logs=100M size

and restarted neo4j, but it hasn't removed any of the old log files. Can I do this manually when neo4j has stopped? Or are all of these files required? I stopped neo4j, made a backup of the graph.db directory, removed all bar neostore.transaction.db.7 and started neo4j again. It appears to be happy but...

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you database in good condition you can delete all neostore.transaction.db.x files, but I recommend to you backup them.

1. Stop Neo4j
2. Delete neostore.transaction.db.x files
3. Start Neo4j

Answer 2

Updating:

In neo4j 3.x, the config has changed to:

dbms.tx_log.rotation.retention_policy=<true/false>
dbms.tx_log.rotation.retention_policy=<amount> <type>

see https://neo4j.com/docs/operations-manual/current/configuration/transaction-logs/ for more details