bzip2recover

bzip2recover file.bz2

bzip2recover attempts to recover data from damaged bzip2 compressed files. It works by extracting intact blocks from corrupted .bz2 files, potentially recovering some or most of the data.The tool is useful when bzip2 files become corrupted and normal decompression fails.

The tool:1. Scans the damaged .bz2 file for valid block boundaries.2. Writes each intact block to a separate file named rec0000Ninput.bz2 (e.g. rec00001damaged.bz2, rec00002damaged.bz2).3. Each recovered single-block file can then be decompressed independently with bunzip2.

- Block-level recovery- Does not modify the original file- Works on partially corrupted files- Produces one .bz2 file per intact block

Cannot recover data inside a corrupted block — only whole blocks bounded by intact 48-bit block-start/end markers are saved. The first block is often unrecoverable because its leading bits sit in the file header. Effective only on files compressed with a block size larger than the default (recovery requires multiple blocks). Recovered blocks must be decompressed and concatenated manually. Backups are far more reliable than recovery.

bzip2recover has been included with bzip2 since version 1.0 in 2000 to help recover from corruption.

bzip2(1), bunzip2(1), ddrescue(1)