What is the bootTel.dat file in Windows?

I noticed this file at C:\bootTel.dat on Windows 10. It is a very small file. The owner is Administrators and Everyone has Full Control.

This file appears to be related to autochk.exe, which is sometimes run by Windows at startup to check for filesystem issues. You can confirm this by running the command-line SysInternals strings tool on C:\Windows\System32\autochk.exe and you'll see the string bootTel.dat, with its distinctive capitalization.

If you check the modified date of C:\bootTel.dat, you may notice that it is near the time of an Event Log event like the following:

Log Name: Application
Source: Wininit
Event ID: 1001
Description starting with "Checking file system"

Based on the name, my guess is that the file is telemetry information written by autochk.exe and read by Windows later to tell Microsoft about filesystem issues, so that they may improve Windows in the future.