Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that such a problem occurs and it is not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of widespread file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
In case you host your sites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you do not need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform works with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This may happen at the time of the writing process on any drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives right away and if a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your data will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.