Restart problem in Nagios

I am bit new to nagios. When ever I restart the nagios, it stop monitoring the services since then for that day. What should I do to prevent this problem. What I found in nagios documentation is, it resets the status.dat file for each restart. I don’t think I have to keep that file manually and update the status.dat file each time I restart. Appreciate your input to over come this issue.

Thanks in advance
Narasimha

check nagios.cfg, somewhere there’s a n option to keep info between restarts. Sorry can’t remember how it’s called now.