Help opening backup again

Been stuck on this all damn day.

I used backup wizard (cPanel) on my live site and downloaded the file to my PC (many times)
After extracting the file using either Winzip or 7Zip I'm still unable to open the homedir.tar file.

Anyone able to offer some assistance.

Serious:

Been stuck on this all damn day.

I used backup wizard (cPanel) on my live site and downloaded the file to my PC (many times)
After extracting the file using either Winzip or 7Zip I'm still unable to open the homedir.tar file.

Anyone able to offer some assistance.

Hi Serious.
The first thing any helpers will need to know is is your PC giving an error/reason why you cannot unzip the file?

Have you tried compiling a FULL backup via the wizard rather than homedir backup? Yes it'll be much larger but if it does the job...

Serious:

After extracting the file using either Winzip or 7Zip I'm still unable to open the homedir.tar file.

Anyone able to offer some assistance.

Winzip often has problems with .tar files.

How large is the homedir.tar file? Are you running out of disk space?

Oh, also ensure you are extracting the .tar file from the zip file and then extracting the files from the .tar file. Don't try to do this in one single step/process. Your wording would suggest that this is what you are probably doing anyway, but I'm not going to make that assumption in this case.

Cheers
Rod.

ps. If you can unzip the download file without errors you can be assured of two things.

1. The download file is perfectly intact and valid. (re-downloading is pointless)
2. The homedir.tar file within the zip archive is also perfectly intact and valid (else you'd be getting checksum errors when unzipping). IOW, if you can't extract from the .tar file there is something amiss locally with your system, the software, or the process you are using to extract the file. .TAR files are actually a very simple format that doesn't even use compression. The individual files are just 'linked' into one large file (which is often then compressed with gzip, to form a '.tar.gz' file.

picandnix:

Have you tried compiling a FULL backup via the wizard rather than homedir backup? Yes it'll be much larger but if it does the job...

Firstly from the OP's description s/he IS using a FULL backup.

Secondly, if s/he is was having a problem and only had the homedir backup then advising them to do a full backup is only going to aggravate the problem for no other reason than it IS going to be a much larger file.

It's akin to someone having trouble opening a small box, and being advised to place it into a bigger box first because somehow it'll do the job.

Not logical.

Cheers
Rod

Yes I've made a full back-up copy via CPanel and transferred it to my PC via FileZilla, tried this 4 times with the same result.

First step was to extract the entire file, yes I've got enough space on my HDD.

From the list of extracted files I attempt to extract/unzip homedir.tar and get the error messages from both 7zip and winzip.
7zip reports "Can not open file ......\homedir.tar as archive"
Winzip reports "Unable to read header in ......\homedir.tar"

I've done this before using 7zip and didn't run into this.

Serious:

7zip reports "Can not open file ......\homedir.tar as archive"
Winzip reports "Unable to read header in ......\homedir.tar"

About the only time I've seen these particular error messages has been because the homedir.tar file didn't get created properly on the server.
The file containing zero bytes (no headers).

Again, what is the size of the homedir.tar file?

Cheers
Rod

file size is 4.7gb

Serious:

file size is 4.7gb

That could be the problem.

What type of filesystem are you using on your computer?

FAT16 has a 2Gb size limit
FAT32 has a 4Gb size limit
NTFS has a 16 EiB (EiB = exbibyte) limit

If needed you can convert FAT to NTFS by opening a command shell and entering:

CONVERT d: /FS:NTFS where d: is the drive letter of the disk/volume you wish to convert. If you want to watch the details add a /V (for verbose) to the command. Also, to enable all users to access the drive, just in case you might want to also add /NoSecurity to the command line. These latter two are optional and usually not needed.

Cheers
Rod

Since I've done this numerous times without any problems and there have not been any changes to my PC since the last successful back-up download I contacted my hosting provider and asked them to look into it for me.

They recently updated cPanel so I thought it might have something to do with the problem i'm having.

They were able to duplicate the problem and will be looking into the cause and resolution this week.

I'll post up again when I know more.