The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, yet often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. Because of this, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.