Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If such a problem appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will become long term. Numerous widespread file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on web hosting servers where huge amounts of info are stored.