Unzip error, is recovery possible

compressioncorruptionzip

I compressed 4 separate folders with some wedding videos (!!) a few months ago. Today I tried to unzip them, and had no problem with the last 2, but the first 2 of them show an error:

   carmensandoval$ unzip AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.zip

   Archive:  AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.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.
   unzip:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.zip    
   or AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.zip.zip, and cannot find   
   AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.zip.ZIP, period.

As someone else suggested in another similar post, I checked if my files were indeed ZIP files, and they are:

file AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.zip 
AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.zip: Zip archive data, at least v1.0 to extract

I suspect that these 2 folders were corrupted when uploading them to send them to a client (they took a while and the connection was interrupted a few times, does this even matter?)
Is there any way to try and get back at least some of what was inside?

Best Answer

The first thing to do is make a copy of the file, to make sure it can be read properly e.g to a file called xx.zip, and determine its length:

 cp AlineJoseLuisVideoCabina_Folder1.zip xx.zip
 ls -l xx.zip

You have the size of any photo from the extracted other zip files, and since you cannot compress photos that much inside a zip file you can calculate if the amount of photos you expect could fit in that archive.

After that assuming the file is big enough to contain anything that might be recoverable, use:

 zip -FF xx.zip --out yy.zip

to try and recover the zip file (that is the zip command, not unzip).

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