Following up on the previous post. Linux (and UNIX in general) has a centralized location for logs: that’s /var/log. Windows does not. The original idea was that you are supposed to use Event Log, which is uniform, centralized and well understood. The problem is, however, that it is a proprietary format, it requires a special viewer to see, non-trivial configuration steps to start writing, its API is cumbersome, slow, and buggy, et cetera, et cetera.

Writing log to plain text files is a deeply respected tradition that is not so easy to uproot. So, where does one put text log files on Windows? Many programs put it in “Program Files” alongside the code. The trouble is, this is now a protected area, and writing to the “Program Files” folder is generally considered a bad idea. Microsoft teams themselves seem to have a disagreement on the log location. System Restore, for example, writes to c:\windows\logs, while WMI goes to c:\windows\system32\logfiles.

The newest trend is to put the logs in c:\programdata\programname, but this makes logs hard to find, since Windows versions prior to Vista did not have the “c:\ProgramData” directory.

The bottom line is, there is no simple answer and every man is for himself.