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I gzipped a folder in an old server that included all of the sites served. That server does not exist anymore and I needed some info from the backup but when I extract the backup (a 26GB file) I only get a 28GB blank file that says "Document" under OSX and no program says it's corrupted or anything. Could I recover any info inside this file or is it a lost cause? I tried anyways everything listed here and got the same result.

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Well, gzip is a pure compression tool. It cannot archive a folder on its own. So what you most probably did is you created a gzipped tarball (via tar czf file.tar.gz folder). To unpack it, you need to tell tar to unpack it: tar xzf file.tar.gz or if you already unpacked the file with gzip you can call tar xf file.tar.

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I get these errors when I tried the commands you mentioned on either the original file or the extracted result tar: Unrecognized archive format tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. – actionAxolot Nov 6 '12 at 19:43
This is what the file command tells me about the file backupaugust.gz: gzip compressed data, was "phpinfo.php", from Unix, last modified: Tue Feb 22 14:55:42 2011 – actionAxolot Nov 6 '12 at 19:45
And what does file say about the unzipped "Document"? – zhenech Nov 7 '12 at 7:52

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