Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function properly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such an issue occurs and it is not found by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many widespread file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.