+1 - further agree that rolling appender shouldn't move over empty files. To the comment of what to do if file cannot be written to for some reason, in that case simply logging out to a default probably would be sufficient. That way the contents are not lost and determination as to why that was even a problem could be made by the developers. Personally, I've never seen a successful startup where there were problems after that point with writing log files so I think it is rather insignificant that the issue ever would occur after the fact. There always seems to be at least something written at startup so if one worked, why wouldn't others. Maybe I'm missing something there but that seems to be improbable but always possible.