The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're various fail-safes, yet often the data gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast amount of time in order to check all of the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.