Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and consequently, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. In case such an issue occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of widely used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on web hosting servers where large volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.