For the sake of keeping our files safe, we tend to make a backup of all of our important files whether they are personal or work related documents. For regular backups we can use software like Zback, Backup Dwarf, Z-DBackup or AOMEI Backupper. Some of these backup software compress the backups and save them as smaller ZIP archives. And if you try to access these ZIP archives after many years, they might become corrupt due to physical errors in the storage media.
If your ZIP files have become corrupt because of media damage then there is still some home if not whole of the ZIP archive has been damaged. You can still find some of the files from the damaged or corrupt archives if you can repair them first. You can repair the damaged ZIP archives using free IZArc archiving utility which comes with some special tools to repair the corrupt archives. Here is how:
- Launch IZArc and from the menubar select Tools → Repair Archive.
- In the repair tool window, browse and select the corrupt ZIP archive. And then click on the Repair button.
- The repaired archive is saved with “_IZArcFixed” appended to the original corrupt ZIP file. For example, if your corrupt file is PIX.ZIP, then it will be repaired and saved as PIX_IZArcFixed.ZIP which you can open in IZArc itself.
However, if your ZIP files have lost data (as opposed to header corruption), then they cannot be repaired because the data is simply not there.
IZArc is a free, lightweight and feature rich archive creation, extraction and repair tool. It can be installed in Windows and used just like any other archive utility. It can be used to compress and decompress archives, create SFX archives, create password protected AES encrypted ZIP files, and open all the popular archive file types like 7-Zip, TAR, RAR, ISO, IMG etc.
You can download IZArc from https://izarc.org/.