Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show 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, etc. When this kind of an issue appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of widely used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues if you buy one of our semi-dedicated server packages since the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all of your files are undamaged at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the sole file system you can get that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems that are not able to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.