I just went to look for my syslogs from last week and the latest one I can find in /boot/logs is from September this year.  I was looking for historical evidence about a failing drive.

 

I guess this has something to do with the abandonment of the powerdown script - how can we get this feature back?

 

I also find that preclear no longer reports all the attributes - this drive was throwing thousands of 'Raw read error rate' and 'Multi zone error rate' counts, but preclear didn't record/report those.

I went looking, too, and didn't find any.  Perhaps, you should should start a thread in the "Feature Requests" section of the forum requesting that it be added (since it was a part of the Powerdown plugin).

dlandon has added syslog archiving functionality to his Tips and Tweaks plugin.

You are right!  But, apparently, it is off by default...