Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware fails. The moment a file is damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are more likely to occur on larger hard disks where vast volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is 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 healthy one and it will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers these days often are not able to discover corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
If you host your websites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any kind of information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives live and in case a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your data will remain unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.