Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. In case such a problem appears and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all other drives and the harm will become long term. Numerous widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is found, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your data will remain undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.