Lziprecover Manual

This manual is for Lziprecover (version 1.15-pre1, 17 June 2013).

• Introduction: Purpose and features of lziprecover
• Invoking Lziprecover: Command line interface
• Repairing Files: Fixing bit-flip and similar errors
• Merging Files: Fixing several damaged copies
• File Format: Detailed format of the compressed file
• Examples: A small tutorial with examples
• Problems: Reporting bugs
• Concept Index: Index of concepts

This manual is free documentation: you have unlimited permission to copy, distribute and modify it.

1 Introduction

Lziprecover is a data recovery tool and decompressor for files in the lzip compressed data format (.lz) able to repair slightly damaged files, recover badly damaged files from two or more copies, extract data from damaged files, decompress files and test integrity of files.

Lziprecover is able to recover or decompress files produced by any of the compressors in the lzip family; lzip, plzip, minilzip/lzlib, clzip and pdlzip. It makes lzip files resistant to bit-flip, one of the most common forms of data corruption, and its recovery capabilities contribute to make of the lzip format one of the best options for long-term data archiving.

Lziprecover is able to efficiently extract a range of bytes from a multi-member file, because it only decompresses the members containing the desired data.

Lziprecover can print correct total file sizes and ratios even for multi-member files.

When recovering data, lziprecover takes as arguments the names of the damaged files and writes zero or more recovered files depending on the operation selected and whether the recovery succeeded or not. The damaged files themselves are never modified.

When decompressing or testing file integrity, lziprecover behaves like lzip or lunzip.

If a file is too damaged for lziprecover to repair it, all the recoverable data in all members of the file can be extracted with the following command (the resulting file may contain errors and some garbage data may be produced at the end of each member):

     lziprecover -D0 -i -o file -q file.lz

If the cause of file corruption is damaged media, the combination GNU ddrescue + lziprecover is the best option for recovering data from multiple damaged copies. See ddrescue-example, for an example.

Lziprecover is not a replacement for regular backups, but a last line of defense for the case where the backups are also damaged.

2 Invoking Lziprecover

The format for running lziprecover is:

     lziprecover [options] [files]

Lziprecover supports the following options:

`-h'

`--help'

Print an informative help message describing the options and exit.

`-V'

`--version'

Print the version number of lziprecover on the standard output and exit.

`-c'

`--stdout'

Decompress to standard output. Needed when reading from a named pipe (fifo) or from a device. Use it to recover as much of the uncompressed data as possible when decompressing a corrupt file.

`-d'

`--decompress'

Decompress.

`-D range'

`--range-decompress=range'

Decompress only a range of bytes starting at decompressed byte position `begin' and up to byte position `end - 1'. Three formats of range are recognized, `begin', `begin-end', and `begin,size'. If only begin is specified, end is taken as the end of the file. The produced bytes are sent to standard output unless the `--output' option is used. In order to guarantee the correctness of the data produced, all members containing any part of the desired data are decompressed and their integrity is verified. This operation is more efficient in multi-member files because it only decompresses the members containing the desired data.

`-f'

`--force'

Force overwrite of output files.

`-i'

`--ignore-errors'

Make `--range-decompress' ignore data errors and continue decompressing the remaining members in the file. For example, `lziprecover -i -D0 file.lz > file' decompresses all the recoverable data in all members of `file.lz' without having to split it first.

`-k'

`--keep'

Keep (don't delete) input files during decompression.

`-l'

`--list'

Print total file sizes and ratios. The values produced are correct even for multi-member files. Use it together with `-v' to see information about the members in the file.

`-m'

`--merge'

Try to produce a correct file merging the good parts of two or more damaged copies. If successful, a repaired copy is written to the file `file_fixed.lz'. The exit status is 0 if a correct file could be produced, 2 otherwise. See the chapter Merging Files (see Merging Files) for a complete description of the merge mode.

`-o file'

`--output=file'

Place the output into `file' instead of into `file_fixed.lz'. If splitting, the names of the files produced are in the form `rec01file', `rec02file', etc. If decompressing from standard input and `--stdout' has not been specified, use `file' as the name of the decompressed file.

`-q'

`--quiet'

Quiet operation. Suppress all messages.

`-R'

`--repair'

Try to repair a file with small errors (up to one byte error per member). If successful, a repaired copy is written to the file `file_fixed.lz'. `file' is not modified at all. The exit status is 0 if the file could be repaired, 2 otherwise. See the chapter Repairing Files (see Repairing Files) for a complete description of the repair mode.

`-s'

`--split'

Search for members in `file' and write each member in its own `.lz' file. You can then use `lziprecover -t' to test the integrity of the resulting files, decompress those which are undamaged, and try to repair or partially decompress those which are damaged.

The names of the files produced are in the form `rec01file.lz', `rec02file.lz', etc, and are designed so that the use of wildcards in subsequent processing, for example, `lziprecover -cd rec*file.lz > recovered_data', processes the files in the correct order. The number of digits used in the names varies depending on the number of members in `file'.

`-t'

`--test'

Check integrity of the specified file(s), but don't decompress them. This really performs a trial decompression and throws away the result. Use it together with `-v' to see information about the file.

`-v'

`--verbose'

Verbose mode.
When decompressing or testing, further -v's (up to 4) increase the verbosity level, showing status, dictionary size, compression ratio, trailer contents (CRC, data size, member size), and up to 6 bytes of trailing garbage (if any).

Table of SI and binary prefixes (unit multipliers):

Prefix	Value	|	Prefix	Value
k	kilobyte (10^3 = 1000)	|	Ki	kibibyte (2^10 = 1024)
M	megabyte (10^6)	|	Mi	mebibyte (2^20)
G	gigabyte (10^9)	|	Gi	gibibyte (2^30)
T	terabyte (10^12)	|	Ti	tebibyte (2^40)
P	petabyte (10^15)	|	Pi	pebibyte (2^50)
E	exabyte (10^18)	|	Ei	exbibyte (2^60)
Z	zettabyte (10^21)	|	Zi	zebibyte (2^70)
Y	yottabyte (10^24)	|	Yi	yobibyte (2^80)

3 Repairing Files

Lziprecover is able to repair files with small errors (up to one byte error per member). The error may be located anywhere in the file except in the header (first 6 bytes of each member) or in the `Member size' field of the trailer (last 8 bytes of each member). This makes lzip files resistant to bit-flip, one of the most common forms of data corruption.

Bit-flip happens when one bit in the file is changed from 0 to 1 or vice versa. It may be caused by bad RAM or even by natural radiation. I have seen a case of bit-flip in a file stored in an USB flash drive.

4 Merging Files

If you have several copies of a file but all of them are too damaged to repair them (see Repairing Files), lziprecover can try to produce a correct file merging the good parts of the damaged copies.

The merge may succeed even if some copies of the file have all the headers and trailers damaged, as long as there is at least one copy of every header and trailer intact, even if they are in different copies of the file.

The merge will fail if the damaged areas overlap (at least one byte is damaged in all copies), or are adjacent and the boundary can't be determined, or if the copies have too many damaged areas.

To give you an idea of its possibilities, when merging two copies each of them with one damaged area affecting 1 percent of the copy, the probability of obtaining a correct file is about 98 percent. With three such copies the probability rises to 99.97 percent. For large files with small errors, the probability approaches 100 percent even with only two copies.

5 File Format

Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

+---+
|   | <-- the vertical bars might be missing
+---+

represents one byte; a box like this:

+==============+
|              |
+==============+

represents a variable number of bytes.

Each member has the following structure:

+--+--+--+--+----+----+=============+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| ID string | VN | DS | Lzma stream | CRC32 |   Data size   |  Member size  |
+--+--+--+--+----+----+=============+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

All multibyte values are stored in little endian order.

`ID string'

A four byte string, identifying the lzip format, with the value "LZIP".

`VN (version number, 1 byte)'

Just in case something needs to be modified in the future. 1 for now.

`DS (coded dictionary size, 1 byte)'

Lzip divides the distance between any two powers of 2 into 8 equally spaced intervals, named "wedges". The dictionary size is calculated by taking a power of 2 (the base size) and substracting from it a number of wedges between 0 and 7. The size of a wedge is (base_size / 16).
Bits 4-0 contain the base 2 logarithm of the base size (12 to 29).
Bits 7-5 contain the number of wedges (0 to 7) to substract from the base size to obtain the dictionary size.
Example: 0xD3 = (2^19 - 6 * 2^15) = (512KiB - 6 * 32KiB) = 320KiB
Valid values for dictionary size range from 4KiB to 512MiB.

`Lzma stream'

The lzma stream, finished by an end of stream marker. Uses default values for encoder properties. See the lzip manual for a full description.

`CRC32 (4 bytes)'

CRC of the uncompressed original data.

`Data size (8 bytes)'

Size of the uncompressed original data.

`Member size (8 bytes)'

Total size of the member, including header and trailer. This field acts as a distributed index, allows the verification of stream integrity, and facilitates safe recovery of undamaged members from multi-member files.

6 A small tutorial with examples

Example 1: Restore a regular file from its compressed version `file.lz'. If the operation is successful, `file.lz' is removed.

     lziprecover -d file.lz

     lziprecover -tv file.lz

     lziprecover -D 0,10KiB file.lz

     lziprecover -D 10000-15000 file.lz

     lziprecover -v -R file.lz
       Copy of input file repaired successfully.
     mv file_fixed.lz file.lz

     lziprecover -s file.lz
     lziprecover -tv rec*file.lz

     ddrescue -b2048 /dev/cdrom cdimage1 logfile1
     mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro cdimage1 /mnt/cdimage
     cp /mnt/cdimage/backup.tar.lz rescued1.tar.lz
     umount /mnt/cdimage
       (insert second copy in the CD drive)
     ddrescue -b2048 /dev/cdrom cdimage2 logfile2
     mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro cdimage2 /mnt/cdimage
     cp /mnt/cdimage/backup.tar.lz rescued2.tar.lz
     umount /mnt/cdimage
     lziprecover -m -v -o rescued.tar.lz rescued1.tar.lz rescued2.tar.lz

     lziprecover -m -v -o big_db_00001.lz big_db1_00001.lz big_db2_00001.lz
       Input files merged successfully

7 Reporting Bugs

There are probably bugs in lziprecover. There are certainly errors and omissions in this manual. If you report them, they will get fixed. If you don't, no one will ever know about them and they will remain unfixed for all eternity, if not longer.

If you find a bug in lziprecover, please send electronic mail to lzip-bug@nongnu.org. Include the version number, which you can find by running `lziprecover --version'.

Concept Index

• bugs: Problems
• examples: Examples
• file format: File Format
• getting help: Problems
• introduction: Introduction
• invoking: Invoking Lziprecover
• merging files: Merging Files
• repairing files: Repairing Files