Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it is not found by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Numerous popular file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on internet hosting servers where substantial volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We guarantee the integrity of the info uploaded in each and every website hosting account that is generated on our cloud platform because we use the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only one which was designed to avert silent data corruption thanks to a unique checksum for each file. We'll store your info on a number of SSD drives that work in a RAID, so the same files will be present on several places at the same time. ZFS checks the digital fingerprint of all files on all the drives in real time and in case the checksum of any file differs from what it should be, the file system swaps that file with an undamaged copy from a different drive in the RAID. No other file system uses checksums, so it's possible for data to get silently corrupted and the bad file to be duplicated on all drives over time, but since this can never happen on a server running ZFS, you do not have to worry about the integrity of your data.