Magnetic disk housekeeping details

Housekeeping details cover the basic way in which the integrity of a file is maintained. For magnetic disks this includes;

The management of the file allocation table and
The maintanence of header record information by the operating system.

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File allocation table

Operating systems like MS-DOS store files in directories. In addition to directories, it uses an area on a disk (diskette or hard disk) called the File Allocation Table (FAT). When a disk is formatted MS-DOS creates this table on the disk and creates an empty directory called the root directory. So, on each of your disks, the directories store files, and the File Allocation Table keeps track of their locations.

Header records

Further each file must contain "basic" information.

This includes

Name
Size
and audit data such as
- Date and time created, modifid and accessed.
and attributes such as
- Read-only, Hidden, Archive and System