I gzipped a folder in an old server that included all of the sites served. That server does not exist anymore and I needed some info from the backup but when I extract the backup (a 26GB file) I only get a 28GB blank file that says "Document" under OSX and no program says it's corrupted or anything. Could I recover any info inside this file or is it a lost cause? I tried anyways everything listed here and got the same result.
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Well, gzip
is a pure compression tool. It cannot archive a folder on its own. So what you most probably did is you created a gzipped tarball (via tar czf file.tar.gz folder
). To unpack it, you need to tell tar
to unpack it: tar xzf file.tar.gz
or if you already unpacked the file with gzip
you can call tar xf file.tar
.

zhenech
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I get these errors when I tried the commands you mentioned on either the original file or the extracted result tar: Unrecognized archive format tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. – actionAxolot Nov 06 '12 at 19:43
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This is what the file command tells me about the file backupaugust.gz: gzip compressed data, was "phpinfo.php", from Unix, last modified: Tue Feb 22 14:55:42 2011 – actionAxolot Nov 06 '12 at 19:45
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And what does `file` say about the unzipped "Document"? – zhenech Nov 07 '12 at 07:52