The process of files being corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find several fail-safes, yet often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice a thing. Thus, a bad file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to be able to check all of the files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.