Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of commonly used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where huge volumes of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
In case you host your sites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you won't need to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All the information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSDs. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is found, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your data will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.