Since some of my switches (many of them) give me double notifications, how can i get more of a prior log? How can I go back farther? Is there some sort of a switch? How is it limited?
It's limited by size. No way to extend it. You can use device event history or disable other logging or anything that is logging a lot of excess.
Is it the size of the notifications?
That is, for example, I have a daily run of which devices are open. If I eliminate that app from being run, will I be able to go further back?
It's a cap on the total size (bytes) of past notifications that it will store. The best thing you can do is tuen off debug (or info/description) logging where you don't need it in apps or drivers. Most stock drivers and apps support this (but usually don't go crazy with it on, either). Some custom ones are quite verbose if left unrestrained, but most support limiting these logs, and if not, you can do it yourself. 
I'm using mqtt + collectd for storing information I need
I am using NodeRed running in a docker container to listen to the logs and event socket and write events to a MySQL database and a txt file.
I see from looking at my past logs that some devices and apps are particularly verbose.
I'm going to turn off that verbosity in the device preferences.
If that doesn't give me enough of a past log, I'd like to ask for your node red flow, and I'll put it on a NAS that I have in a container.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I have a QNAP NAS and running several HA containers including InfluxDB and Grafana. You can do so much more than logging 
See this recent thread of mine:
Community members like @stephack and @dan.t have been extremely helpful answering many questions of mine and helping me with setup as NodeRed and Grafana are very new to me.
You can read quite a bit about NodeRed in this thread:
1 Like
