Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. When such a problem occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Numerous widespread file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on hosting servers where large amounts of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a hosting account from our company, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All the data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous 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 will not get corrupted. This could happen during the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is located, it's 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 a whole drive fails.