The process of files getting damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, yet often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. Thus, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to discover a problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.