Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should since its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of a problem appears and it is not found by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will become permanent. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where large volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption as all of our storage servers use the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to verify the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on several redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disk drives. All the copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, and if it discovers a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's an unexpected blackout, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some failure, extending the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.