Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software fails. After a file is damaged, it will no longer work correctly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where substantial volumes of info are placed. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often cannot detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.
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 your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and afterwards a bad copy may 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 immediately and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your data will remain undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.