mm wrote:

That might be what I've been thinking about. What DOES a journaling
file system do before it commits data to the hard drive?

Journalling, as performed by an NTFS file system, sacrifices user data
that was being written during an interrupted write operation for the
sake of maintaining a "clean" file system.

Under FAT/FAT32, data that was being written during an interrupted
operation can be salvaged, and until that salvage is done the file
system continues to operate just fine because it suffers no real
structural dammage in the process.

I had an NT-4 web server that would nuke 2 weeks worth of IIS log files
any time the server lost power - even though IIS closed each file at the
start of a new day. After the system came back up, the log files were
still there, same time-stamp and file-size, but they were filled will
null characters.