Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software failures. After a file gets damaged, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where considerable volumes of info are stored. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often are unable to detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
In case you host your websites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on each drive and then a bad copy can be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives live and if a corrupted file is discovered, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your data will stay intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.