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enter image description hereI tried to zip a backup folder that contains 50 GB of data. The result is a octet-stream (full 50 GB) instead of a zip file.

I have already erased the source data before I realize the issue.

Is there a way to fix this? i.e. to create a zip file of these data? or to extract data from the octet-stream?

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    What command did you use to create the zip file? Commented Oct 27, 2022 at 5:27
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    What does unzip -l backup.zip say? Commented Oct 27, 2022 at 6:45
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    The -I option is invalid on my Linux. What is your distro, and what does the man page say it does? Mine has a -i option which "emits mime-strings rather than human-readable ones". I suspect your file is a .zip, but you suppressed that information. If the contents of your folder were already compressed (e.g. images) then zip will not achieve significant reductions, so 50GB would be understandable. Commented Oct 27, 2022 at 8:22
  • @StephenKitt i get the following : Archive: backup.zip End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on the last disk(s) of this archive. note: backup.zip may be a plain executable, not an archive unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of backup.zip or backup.zip.zip, and cannot find backup.zip.ZIP, period. Commented Oct 27, 2022 at 16:47
  • @RomeoNinov on windows -> right click on the folder -> add to archive Commented Oct 27, 2022 at 16:49

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I see the reply to @RomeoNinov that this file was created in some version (which?) of Windows in the File Manager GUI. Is it possible to transfer the archive back to Windows and check the contents there?

How did the .zip get to be on a Linux system? Something like FTP needs to be configured to transfer in binary mode (as opposed to ascii mode) to avoid having bytes that look like newline converted, for example.

Linux zip only claims it works for .zip file created in MSDOS, OS/2, Windows 9x/NT/XP. No mention of Win 7, 10 or 11 there. You might try 7z instead of unzip, as it may deal with more recent Windows formats.

I see you are working in /tmp. You might show the results of df -h /tmp. Any file transfer between machines may have failed due to lack of space, and 50GB seems generous for /tmp, so the file may indeed be incomplete, as the error message says. Also, /tmp tends to get cleared at reboot, so it would be easy to lose the backup.zip file itself.

It may prove impossible to recover this data, due to the chain of operations which it has undergone.

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  • The file was created originally in windows 10 64 bit system. I transferred the file via my SD card to my MAC book and tried to extract it there. I tried 7-zip on both mac and windows and neither worked. Any suggestion on what else I can do? Commented Oct 28, 2022 at 19:27

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