The process of files getting corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find a couple of fail-safes, but often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see a thing. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a good one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to identify a problem early enough or require a long amount of time in order to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
If you host your sites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of NVMes. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur throughout 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 compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives right away and when a corrupted file is located, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your data will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.