Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case this kind of an issue appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
In case you host your sites in a cloud web hosting account with our company, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform works with the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All of the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of SSD drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is found, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your data will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.