7zip 0 byte files data corrupt – The worst archive program ever written
Last Updated on Friday, 9 April 2010 05:10 Written by Simon Nicol Saturday, 23 January 2010 10:03
If you’ve just come across this article I hope it’s not because you’ve been using 7zip – and now you’ve found out that your archive contains numerous 0 byte files and data errors., corrupt data, files that are lost, damaged or otherwise irretrievable – I fully understand how you feel.
Never, never EVER use 7Zip.
7zip is probably the most dangerous ‘archive’ program in existence. You have probably just learnt that lesson to your cost as I just have.
I used 7zip to archive all my websites. The compressed archive is just over 5GB – that’s a lot of files. I copied the archive over to three other computers on my network for safe keeping – that’s how important these files are were to me. These files represent the past two years work for me, every source file, every agonising hour pouring over ActionScript 3.0 – completely and totally lost forever. I’m still in a state of shock about just how much damage the 7zip program has done to me. Thousands and thousands of hours work lost for good.
I can’t rate 7zip badly enough. To give it one star out of five would be like giving Hitler a Good Citizen of the Year award. If I were working for anyone other than myself it would have cost me my career for sure.
I have emailed the programmer – hoping against hope that there might be a way to extract my source code, PSD’s, After Effect files… but so far no reply. That’s probably because there is no way to correct this fatal flaw in 7zip’s programming.
I cannot begin to stress strongly enough to – never, never, never use 7zip.
If you hear of anyone praising 7zip that’s probably because they’re either truly and deeply ignorant, or just blissfully unaware of how much damage 7zip could potentially do to their career. They are also probably only using a relatively small number of files. This program does not deserve any praise at all – none. In fact is deserves as much praise as the number of 0 (zero) bytes files it created in my ‘archive’ that’s 5Gig and over 28,000 zero byte files.
Doing some simple math – Let’s just say I work 120 hours per week * 50 weeks per year * 2 years = 12,000 hours work. Using the absolute minimum wage as a standard to go by (and I hope my time is worth more than the absolute minimum) of £5.73 that comes to £68,760.
Which is far more than I’ve actually earned, but it’s a good measure of the amount of effort I’ve put in over the past two years and I’m using this post for a number of reasons. To blow off some steam. To expose 7zip for the career ending nightmare from hell code that it is. And also to ask anyone – in the entire World that might happen to read this post if you know of any possible way that this insane amount of damage to my career/life/sanity might be un-done?
Currently not a very happy bunny.
Simon
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0 Byte files are most likely caused by insufficient rights and PEBKAC, it is highly unlikey that 7zip is at fault. Oh and you always should test the archives, thats like elementary data management ….
Humm. There’s no error message that suggests it’s a rights issue especially when using Windows and logged in as Administrator – I would say it’s extreamily unlikely that it isn’t a 7zip problem.
Having used PKZIP for over 20 years I was expecting 7zip to be as robust. I would gladly pay anyone who can recover my full archive…
“There’s no error message that suggests it’s a rights issue especially when using Windows and logged in as Administrator”
No, you are not logged in as Adminstrator because such a user does not exist anymore in Win Vista / 7 – you are logged in as a pseudo-admin which needs to escalate his rights manually (via the UAC)