journal
journalling

    An on-going record of transactions, such as
   database updates, file system writes, procedure calls or
   message transmissions.  A journal differs from a simple log
   in that the contents of the journal can be used to reconstruct
   the state of the system after a failure by re-applying the
   transactions in the journal to a snapshot of the system
   previous state.

   (2008-05-29)