Hello all,
I have a large (183 GB) .tar file that has become corrupted. This is actually the _secondary_ backup of this data. The primary backup (a USB HDD) was lost, so I was disappointed to find that _this_ backup isn't easily accessible.
From inspection and memory, it seems that this .tar file was corrupted by a poorly invoked file transfer operation, e.g., FTP with mixed up ASCII/binary settings. Each line ends with '^M' before the '\n', and because this tarball has a lot of binary data in it `dos2unix -f` is unlikely to restore all occurrences of mangled line endings.
The first line of the .tar file is "Password:", and I can think of several possibilities as to how this could have happened.
I have made a copy of the file to perform surgery on it. Unsurprisingly, the results of `dos2unix -f corrupted_tar_file.tar` crash out after only a couple of dozen entries when listing: `tar tvf corrupted_tar_file_unix_eol.tar`.
There's a lot of binary data I want to keep on here. I am willing and keen to learn how to forensically retrieve my data, and I would greatly appreciate any help pointing me in the right direction. Thank you for reading this far already!!
If you need transcripts of anything please let me know!!
Kind regards,
I. Hope Nothing