
If the resulting checksum matches, you know the file you have is identical.Ĭomputers use checksum-style techniques to check data for problems in the background, but you can also do this yourself.

If you know the checksum of the original file, you can run a checksum or hashing utility on it. For example, a file might not have properly downloaded due to network issues, or hard drive problems could have caused corruption in a file on disk. You can use checksums to check files and other data for errors that occur during transmission or storage. A single character difference in the underlying file produces a very different looking checksum. After running Windows 10’s built-in checksumming utility on them, we saw very different checksums. For example, we created two different text files that are almost the same, but one has an exclamation point where the other has a period.


Small changes in the file produce very different looking checksums.
