Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such an issue occurs and it is not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all other drives and the harm will be long term. A number of commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, however, it is very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems don't feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy will be substituted with a good one from another drive. Due to the fact that this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.