I’ve been using WinRAR for the longest time. It’s done a good job of keeping all off my files in archive. Now when trying to access my backup archives, all of the files inside them seem to be ok, except for the .CAB files. Everytime I try to extract them, I keep getting a “CRC Failed” or “file is corrupt”. Ok, no problem, I have a backup of all my files on tape way before I’ve had these problems. So I restore them from July, a time I knew for sure that these files were all intact and in excellent working order. And what happens when I try to extract these files? I still get the some errors, but only with the .CAB files. I’ve done a virus scan, everything is clean. I’ve tried extracting on another machine, 2 machines - same errors. I’ve tried using the DOS version to exctract, same errors.
Basically, what is wrong with these .CAB files that they got corrupted? And how is it that they’re corrupted even when I restored arhived files that I knew were working and are still corrupted? Did Bill Gates decide to have archiving programs reject reading .CAB files in a recent Windows Update? Seems that way.
This really sucks because I’ve been archiving stuff for a long time and it seems if my tape backups aren’t going to do me any good, I’ll have to start all over again - and that would suck.