[drdaeman]

There are logs that are useless (but they're logged because someone's lazy to turn them off), logs that are somehow useful (but nobody will grief their loss) and logs that are important and better'd be reliably stored.

Syslog (if we talk about networking - not with UDP, but with reliable TCP or SCTP-based protocol) and fsync() after each write is reliable solution.

If you're logging mostly pointless runtime data (like webserver access logs to static files, which, most of time, nobody ever cares about) with reliable syslog - you're doing it wrong. (That's why webservers don't generally use syslog, but directly write to files.) If you're logging important transactions with unreliable logging system - you're doing it wrong, too.

There's nothing wrong with syslog. Just use the right tool for the right job.