To replace a single thing with a huge thing is completely insane, contrary to the Unix philosophy and that’s not even considering the redundant bilge systemd’s journal pushes out. Not only redundant but lacking context often. Binary log files? What kind of lunatic would want that? We have for decades tools that parse text files and someone thinks it’s a good idea to make logs binary files?

The fact is systemd is a large, stinky cesspool – an embarrassment to any programmer worth their salt. And Lennart loves to whine about how things are so terribly unfair. Well, life is unfair. If he wants people to be ‘nice’ to him he ought to be nice to other people. But he prefers to be a hypocrite.

How do I know if things are being logged twice?
I guess two entries for every log item?

@SmokinMoe

If persistent storage is now working fine, I suggest you leave rsyslog installed. But if your system is now logging everything twice, then consider uninstalling it.

That seems to have fixed it. Thank you very much :-)

I did some more research and discovered the documentation in /usr/share/doc/systemd/README.Debian says ‘If you enable persistent logging, consider uninstalling rsyslog or any other system-log-daemon, to avoid logging everything twice.”

Should I uninstall?

‘rsyslog ‘sudo apt remove rsyslog‘ & ‘sudo apt purge rsyslog‘

What about ‘other system-log-daemon’?

@SmokinMoe

Run these commands to create a directory where your logs can be stored:

# mkdir /var/log/journal
# systemd-tmpfiles - -create - -prefix /var/log/journal
# systemctl restart systemd-journald

For more info, check out the solution in this thread: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/159221/how-do-i-display-log-messages-from-previous-boots-under-centos-7