[Info-vax] ODS-5 data/file recovery

[Paul Sture]

In article <51209a06$0$73605$815e3792 at news.qwest.net>,
 George Cornelius <gcornelius at charter.net> wrote:

> Another idea is to generate another ZIP file that is similar,
> say by number of files present and data contents of the files,
> and try to determine if there is something at the beginning of
> a ZIP file that will ID it.  I suppose you will find, at
> a minimum, the name of the first file stored within the
> archive.  But that's a long road, because you will have only
> come up with a way to recognize the first block of the file,
> and unless the blocks were allocated contiguously, that may
> not help you much with the rest of it unless you really
> dig deep into ZIP file formats and find some way to recognize
> the remaining data (but you could assume it was allocated
> contiguously and just grab a large chunk and copy it to
> another file and then try to UNZIP it).

Well going back to the days of floppies*, ZIP stores its file index at 
the end of the container.

* If you remember zipfiles spanning multiple floppies, you will also 
recall that on extracting a file you would be prompted for the last 
floppy.

-- 
Paul Sture