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 for that reason, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such a problem occurs and it is not found by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will be long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you will not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform uses the amazing ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can happen at the time of the writing process on any drive and after that a bad copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your information will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.