Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When such a problem appears and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will be long term. Many widespread file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on hosting servers where huge volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud web hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.