The process of files getting corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're various fail-safes, yet often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time in order to check all the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.