Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination 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 noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all the other drives and the harm will become long term. A number of frequently used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on internet hosting servers where large amounts of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.