Hello,

I've been trying to extract data from a tar gz file, however all of my attempts are getting stuck at a particular location in the file.

I created a the file as a backup a few months back using "tar zcfv", and have checked using "file" that it is in fact a tar gz file.

I've tried the following to extract the data:

tar zxfv

cpio -ivd

and

gzrecover

Both exit (tar with this message: tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors , and gzrecover with a segmentation fault). I also was able to get a "corrupt file" error, I think from tar or cpio, at some point (perhaps on my mac, but not on ubuntu). The tgz file is about 60GB, so it's quite large. All of these data were backup on two separate external hard drives, but unfortunately the computer and both external hard drives were stolen after someone broke into friends house. I happened to have backup her external hard drive (before formatting it for her) in multiple locations, one happened to be this tgz file, which I was able to recover from a time-machine backup.

so, The main issue here is, tar, gzrecover and cpio all fail when recovering the file. I can get to about 11GB of data out of this 60GB tar gz file before these programs fail...


Does anyone have any advice on how to get more data from this tar file? Is there a way to prevent the segmentation fault from gzrecover or to force tar or cpio to keep going after it hits the corrupted part of the file?


Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm willing to spend time on this, as my friend lost all of her data from that theft...