How much can par2 recover?

[macamba]

Hi,

At the moment I'm looking at a movie who's extraction failed. I ran QuickPar and it states it needs 2462 more blocks (the movie is 2,9 GB in stead of the required DVD5 size). Can I conclude the download failed? And do you know how many missing blocks QuickPar can still recover?

Macamba

[Bjs]

File is either incomplete or damaged

Quickpar can only help should a secondary image of this file exist and contains 100% of all blocks.

Quickpar alone is not able to perform any recovery on any file without the par backup file.

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Recovery may be possible by placing the downloaded file back to original folder it was downloaded to and rehashing from the download link.

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Further recovery can be performed with video editing tools but those missing blocks will need editing, ie cut out.

[jman98]

Bjs is right, but perhaps a more detailed explanation would be helpful here. PAR2 files are recovery files, usually made for archives. The archive could be anything - a DVD, a CD, photographs, etc. The person making the PAR2 files has an option to specify how much of the original archive can be recovered via PAR2 if it is lost or damaged. I've seen values used as low as 5%, but 10% is probably the most common. You can go higher if you want, up to 100%. I've never seen anything above 20% used. Then PAR2 recovery files will be generated and you can use those for recovery when parts of the archive are damaged or missing.

QuickPar is telling you that 2462 blocks of your flile are either damaged or missing. That's quite a lot. You'll need PAR2 files to have any chance of recovering and depending on how they were made, you may not have enough to recover that much. If you have no PAR2 recovery files then you can't do anything with the file you downloaded. So to summarize you MUST have PAR2 files to have any chance of recovering what's missing and you must have enough of them to recover 2462 blocks.

[macamba]

Thanks for the reply. I did had recovery files, but not enough to rescue the movie. Maybe more luck the next time?

[ntscuser]

There are two further possibilities. One is that the "missing" rar files are merely "incomplete" and your newsreader is not set to display them. (Click the button to display incomplete files if your newsreader has one).

The other is that the upload has not yet finished. It can take literally days for a DVD sized posting to appear in full. A clue will be if the highest numbered rars are all missing.

[handyguy]

What newsreader are you using?