How does a DAT become corrupted?

I've always wondered about this, heard multiple people had problems with the game because their DAT became corrupted.

recently all fire stopped being animated for me. It was sooo awkward I decided to delete my DAT and -image while it was at college, and it fixed it.

How does DAT get corrupted in the first place? I'm not really doing any suspicious things on my computer, and All I did was Textmod for cartographer.

It's a big ass database being referenced and written to constantly while playing. If your memory or processor hiccups, or a program decides to nudge its way into priority while transferring data, or if your computer crashes while playing the game, the database can lose information.

Like A11 said - also any file on your pc can become corrupt if windows had crashed or emergency reset.Same with dat file , if gw crashed the data would be part written so corrupted , if pc crashed an reset same thing can happen.
Best prevention is to exit gw normally rather than force exit

Might be a good idea to take a backup once in a while of the DAT file,
especially for thoose who still use archaic connections.

very insightful ty