Have you ever encountered this error message when tried to extract zipped backup files using built in ‘Extract All‘ facility of Windows –

The error message will first give you an impression that the zip file might be corrupt.

This might be true in some cases like a file not downloaded fully from FTP, copied over a network and got corrupted etc.

In most of the cases I have experienced, the zip file was fully functional and it never had any corruptions. The extract all facility still throws errors even though the zip file is valid.

I am not at all a big fan of using the zip/unzip OS facility provided by default, hence I depend on tools like WinRar,PKZIP etc which offers better compression rate, speed etc.

I would recommend extracting the zipped file using any of the above mentioned tools and see if the zip file is really corrupted.

The same zip file which showed errors while tried to extract using the default extract all feature was proved fine and was inflated using PKZIP utility

Conclusion

It’s not always true that the zipped file might be corrupt, hence you should always leverage third party tools to test the file validity.

Thanks for reading.