Large zip on Windows

I have never been a Microsoft fanatic nor an anti-microsoft terrorist, but today I could not believe that large compressed folders got corrupted in Windows !

I have send a relatively small zip file (5gb, peanuts) from AIX to Windows per sftp and in Windows Explorer, some files in the compressed folder (read zip) were just pointing to the wrong content.

I had some issues with large zip files on unix, but this was last century! Howcome could a modern filesystem/operating system have such issues?

I have found a few bugs on support.microsoft.com.

Ex: Compressed folder becomes corrupted when larger than 2 gigabytes
Workaround : make sure that you limit the size of a compressed folder to 2 GB or less

Amazing!

8 thoughts on “Large zip on Windows

  1. Noons

    There are so many 2GB and 4GB boundary bugs in Windows it’s amazing how the platform is still considered a viable enterprise server OS… And yes, that goes for 64-bit Windows as well!

  2. Ziaro

    Built-in zp function in Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 is crappy, too.
    You are not able to create a zip file bigger then 2 GB. “Discovered” it when i tried to compress several small RMAN backup pieces a 512MB into one bigger zip file.

  3. Laurent Schneider Post author

    Thanks for the link. I had no issue with winzip 9 and later. Afaicr, winzip 8 did not support large files and I had to download WZ9 beta, this was about 7 years ago !

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