Running fsck on a number of large filesystems can take quite a bit of time, which is not a good thing given today's high-availability assumptions. The reason that inconsistencies may exist in a filesystem that is not cleanly unmounted is that writes to the disk may have been in progress when the system went down. Applications may have been updating the data contained in files and the system may have been updating filesystem metadata, which is "data about filesystem data" - on other words, the information about which blocks are allocated to which files, which files live in which directories, and so on. Inconsistencies in file data are bad enough, but inconsistencies in filesystem metadata are the stuff of which lost files and other operational nightmares are made.

In order to minimize filesystem inconsistencies and minimize system restart time, journaling filesystems keep track of the changes that they will be making to the filesystem before they actually make them to the filesystem. These records are stored in a separate part of the filesystem, typically known as the "journal" or "log". Once these journal records (also commonly known as "log" records) are safely written, a journaling filesystem applies those changes to the filesystem and then purges those entries from the log. Journal records are organized into sets of related filesystem changes, much like changes made to a database are organized into transactions.

Journaling filesystems maximize filesystem consistency because log records are written before filesystem changes are made, and because the filesystem saves these records until they have been safely and completely applied to the filesystem. When rebooting a computer that uses journaling filesystems, the mount program can guarantee the consistency of the filesystem by simply checking the log for pending changes that are not marked as being done and applying them to the filesystem. In most cases, the system doesn't have to check filesystem consistency, meaning that computers using journaling filesystems are available almost instantly after rebooting them. The chances of losing data due to filesystem consistency problems are similarly reduced.

There are a number of journaling filesystems available for Linux. The best known of these are XFS, a journaling filesystem originally developed by Silicon Graphics but now released as open source, the ReiserFS, a journaling filesystem developed especially for Linux, JFS, a journaling filesystem originally developed by IBM but now released as open source, and the ext3 filesystem, developed by Dr. Stephen Tweedie at Red Hat and a host of other contributors.

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