gzip Recovery Toolkit 0.5 review

The gzip Recovery Toolkit attempts to automate the recovery of data from corrupted gzip files (including tarballs) through a program

License: zlib/libpng License File size: 5K Developer: Aaron M. Renn

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The gzip Recovery Toolkit attempts to automate the recovery of data from corrupted gzip files (including tarballs) through a program called gzrecover. gzip Recovery Toolkit package is still very experimental at this point.

99% of "corrupted" gzip archives are caused by transferring the file via FTP in ASCII mode instead of binary mode. Please re-transfer the file in the correct mode first before attempting to recover from a file you believe is corrupted.

This program is provided AS IS with absolutely NO WARRANTY. It is not guaranteed to recover anything from your file, nor is what it does recover guaranteed to be good data. The bigger your file, the more likely that something will be extracted from it. Also keep in mind that this program gets faked out and is likely to "recover" some bad data. Everything should be manually verified.

Usage:

Run gzrecover on a corrupted .gz file. Anything that can be read from the file will be written to a file with the same name, but with a .recovered appended (any .gz is stripped). You can override this with the -o option.

To get a verbose readout of exactly where gzrecover is finding bad bytes, use the -v option to enable verbose mode. This will probably overflow your screen with text so best to redirect output to a file.

Once gzrecover has finished, you will need to manually verify any data recovered as it is quite likely that our output file is corrupt and has some garbage data in it. If your archive is a tarball, read on.

For tarballs, the tar program will choke because GNU tar cannot handle errors in the file format. Fortunately, GNU cpio (tested at version 2.5 or higher) handles corrupted files out of the box.

Here's an example:

$ ls *.gz
my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ gzrecover my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ ls *.recovered
my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered
$ cpio -F my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered -i -v

If you have a previous release, please note that the patches to GNU tar have been discontinued. They were only marginally successful at best and GNU cpio does what is needed out of the box and does it far better.

What's New in This Release:
Documentation updates, including a man page, plus code cleanup to better enable inclusion in GNU/Linux packages and eliminate compilation warnings.