Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Numerous popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.
