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

[George Cornelius]

Paul Sture wrote:
> Well going back to the days of floppies*, ZIP stores its file index at 
> the end of the container.

Little experiment with zip under Linux (Knoppix), putting two small
text files into an archive:

 First file name starts at offset 30 followed by its data
 Subsequent files preceded by their filename strings
 Index at the end.

George

P.S. If this is a large archive with many files, consider looking
at compressed form of files that you believe are unchanged since
the last available backup.  This gives you more sequences of bytes
to match on in an exhaustive search of the blocks of the disk.

Please note that digging deep into zip format may not be a
particularly fruitful exercise.  But if you have the time and the
inclination you can learn a lot - and _maybe_ save your data.


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