Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. When such a problem occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of commonly used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

In case you host your websites in a hosting account from our company, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform uses the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This could happen at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy can be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and when a corrupted file is located, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will remain undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.