Damn You Damaged Zip File!!!!!

[John Doe 57]

I had a folder which was about 2.8GB. I compressed it to zip format using the command from the file menu. It is now 2.5GB, but refuses to finish unzipping. At about 75% complete it says that it can't open it because it is damaged.

Now when I compressed that folder, I compressed a other folder 20 minutes before. It is 1.5GB in size and unzips perfectly! Why is the larger file not working?

And yes I tried Stuffit Deluxe and Terminal and both don't work. Does anyone know of any other ideas?

 

[Amdahl]

Merely speculating.. Could it be a problem with >2GB ZIP file size?

 

[John Doe 57]

Yeah I heard about that too. How Macs don't like to unzip files over 2GB. Because my other zip file opened fine and it is 1GB less in size than the other one. I mean compression went absolutely fine for both files and now I can't even open it!

How can I make the zip smaller to open it?

 

[Amdahl]

I don't know if you can chop it up and still have it work. I have read that some implementations of ZIP can work on files up to 4GB; perhaps you can find one.

If you want to try a chop, you can use split from the Terminal.

split -b 1500m YourZip.zip ChoppedZip

You'll get a couple files starting with ChoppedZip, which you will want to rename so they have a .zip and then see what happens.

 

[Makosuke]

Huh... I've more than once worked with Zip files significantly larger than 2GB, and I'm pretty sure I didn't have any problem with it. Makes me wonder, though, if there's some additional factor that might screw up >2GB Zip files in some cases and not others.

Time to talk to Mr. Google and see if he can't come up with anything more detailed, I guess.

 

[John Doe 57]

Never Mind! I didn't fix it but I found a way around it! I had made two backups of this folder. One ZIP contained RAR files and the other ZIP contained folders with JPEG files in it. Phew!!!

But it is strange because the ZIP containing the RAR files is 2.97GB in size, the other is 2.5GB in size. Let this be a message to all Mac users out there:

AFTER COMPRESSION, ALWAYS OPEN THE ZIP FILE TO MAKE SURE IT WORKS!!!

AFTER COMPRESSION, ALWAYS OPEN THE ZIP FILE TO MAKE SURE IT WORKS!!!

AFTER COMPRESSION, ALWAYS OPEN THE ZIP FILE TO MAKE SURE IT WORKS!!!