Journal
A journal may refer to any of the following:
1. A journal is a location of stored activities or events on a computer or network. A journal helps to determine what may have caused an issue or a device to go down without having to monitor a device yourself.
2. When describing a place online about a person, an online journal is another name for a blog.
3. With a file system, a journaling file system, or JFS, is a method of tracking how data is manipulated on the hard drive. Each time a request is made to the hard drive, an entry is made in the journal. The JFS allows the computer to check the last few journal entries for errors instead of checking all the files on the drive.
For example, Windows 98 running FAT32 is not a journaling file system, so the system must run ScanDisk if the computer is improperly turned off. However, Windows XP running NTFS (NTFS file system) and later versions of Windows with NTFS, a journaling file system, does not need to run ScanDisk; it checks the journal.