Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the losing of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer display an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such a problem occurs and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all other drives and the damage will be long term. A number of commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. Most hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, however, it's likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since other file systems do not feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard disk drive. Since this happens in real time, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.