Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and for that reason, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When such an issue appears and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.