The process of files being corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are various fail-safes, but often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all the files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.
