If you’ve been using computers since long, you must be aware of data compression. What type of data compression do you use? It’s no wonder if you say ZIP. It’s quite popular among computer users. In a Zip Archive, you can store all your important files in a compressed form. And whenever you want your data back, you can extract the ZIP file. But sometimes you fail to extract your data if the ZIP file is corrupt. In such a situation, you must repair ZIP file by using an easy manual trick. Also, you can use ZIP repair tool to restore ZIP file content in their original form.

Data Compression – Its Uses & Benefits

Over the last two decades, data compression has become a very crucial part in every single computer user’s life. If we talk about its benefits, they’re amazing. I’ve listed a few below:

• If you use data compression, you’re going to save your disk space for sure. Just don’t worry about the integrity of your data, it’ll remain intact.
• If you use data compression to compress your files, you’ll get an excellent file transmission speed.
• And, if you want to secure your data with password protection, you can do that. Most of the data compression tools provide you password protection feature.

In these days, every single computer user is using data compression. There are many types of data compression, and the ZIP is quite a popular one. It’s an Archive file format that supports lossless data compression. In a ZIP archive file, you can store one or more files or directories in compressed form. As far as my knowledge goes, data compression has only one major drawback.

Data Corruption

If you’re using ZIP or any other type of data compression, you just can’t avoid corruption. A ZIP archive file is prone to corruption due to numerous reasons. The fact says nothing can be extracted if ZIP file is corrupt. The most common reasons for corruption in ZIP archive file are virus infection, bugs attacks, software malfunction, hard disk failure, abruptly system shutdown, adding invalid content to a ZIP archive file, network failure, etc.

How to deal with corruption?

Whenever corruption takes place, it increases the chances of data loss. If the ZIP file is corrupt, your crucial data is at high risk. You’re lucky if you take regular backup of your computer system. If you have the backup of your ZIP archive file, you can restore ZIP file content with ease. Make sure the backup file should be valid and updated in order to restore 100% data. But if you don’t have any backup or the backup is itself corrupt, this might be a problematic situation. Here you’re left with only two options: repair ZIP file or use ZIP repair tool to restore ZIP file content. Before you can purchase any paid software, you should definitely choose the first option, i.e. repair ZIP file.

How to Repair ZIP File?

If you want to repair ZIP file, you can do that manually. How? You just need to have WinRAR application, that’s it. It has a built-in repair feature that can help you repair ZIP file without requiring any paid software. You just need to follow these simple steps:

Step 1: First, launch WinRAR application on your system.

Step 2: Click the File menu > Open archive. Or simply press Ctrl + O.

Step 3: On the Find Archive window,  locate the corrupt ZIP file archive and select. Now click the Open button.

You can see the corrupt ZIP archive file is listed on the main screen.

Step 4: Click the Tools menu > Repair archive. Or simply press Alt + R.

Step 5: A small window will pop-up, FileName.zip. Click the Browse button to define a location where you want to save the repaired archive.

Step 6: Now define the archive type. Since you want to repair ZIP file, select the Treat the corrupt archive as ZIP option. Click OK to start the repairing process.

Step 7: Within a couple of minutes, the repairing process will be completed. Finally, click Close.

There’s one manual trick you can try here to repair ZIP file.

Use Data Extraction Feature of WinRAR Application

The WinRAR application has one more useful feature which you can use here, Data Extraction. You just need to follow these simple steps:

Step 1: First, launch WinRAR application on your system.

Step 2: You need to locate the corrupt ZIP archive file, but don’t open it. Right-click to select it in the list.

Step 3: Now click Extract To on the taskbar.

Step 4: On the Extraction path and options window, define a location where you want to decompress ZIP archive file. Define settings and other options as per requirement.

Step 5: Under Miscellaneous section, check the Keep broken files option. Click Save Settings button.

Step 6: Now click OK to start the data extraction process.

Important note: I personally don’t recommend this trick if the ZIP archive file contains large executable files of software applications. But if the ZIP archive file contains images, audios, videos, emails, documents and any other files, the above trick will surely be helpful for you. I don’t guarantee that the above manual tricks will work for you. But there’s no harm in trying them.

ZIP Recovery Software

If the above manual tricks fail or don’t work, this means corruption is severe. In such a situation, you should look forward to a professional solution. ZIP Repair tool is one such solution recommended by professionals and data recovery experts. It can successfully repair ZIP file without causing any alteration and restore ZIP file content in their original form. It supports ZIP archive file of both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Availability

SysInfoTools Software provides free demo version of its ZIP Repair tool. Generally, demo version and licensed version are similar to each other, i.e. same features and functionalities. By using demo version, you can scan corrupt ZIP archive file and check the preview of your data. The saving feature is disabled in the demo version. In order to save the recovered data, place your order for the licensed version of ZIP Repair tool.

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