Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such an issue appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. A number of widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where large amounts of information are stored.