Saturday 14 December 2019

Can a slow internet-connection corrupt a downloaded file?


When downloading a big file, can a slow internet connection cause it to corrupt?



Answer



Update: In the first version of my answer, I was confusing Hamming-Code-error detection with the checksum error detection, which is used in TCP/IP. It is much more unlikely, that errors stay undetected, if a checksum is used. Theoretically it should still be possible, if there are errors in the checksum part of the package and in the rest of it. But that is very unlikely. There are other sources of error, which can corrupt data, though.


As mentioned in the other answer, you can detect errors int the downloaded file by checking the checksum of the file (for example MD5SUM).


The reason for data corruption is always a defective connection or another hardware/software error (like a defective file system or hard disk), the speed of the connection is not important. But a defective connection can slow down your transfers and thus result in a slow data transfer.


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