The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are various fail-safes, still often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see anything. Thus, 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. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require a long time period in order to check all files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.