Target OS: Win2003
As posted in other SO questions about file operation atomicity, Win32 was simply not designed for transactions. Still I wonder whether file deletion could be non-atomic. After all, it is either get deleted or not. Or can a file remain in any other intermediate state on NTFS file system caused by a system crash or something else during deletion?
NTFS is a journaled file system. A journal is basically equivalent to a transaction log in a database. It'll ensure consistency and integrity of the file system structures like a database does for its tables. While File.Delete doesn't have any transactional code at the high level, NTFS does maintain transactional integrity at the filesystem level. This may not be true for other file system drivers.