Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such an issue appears and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. A number of widely used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where large amounts of information are kept.