Archive extraction weirdness...

Joshua Brown

New Member
Hey there! I could've swore that I was already a member here but I had to create a new account so perhaps I was mistaken...

Anyway, Hi! So this is a weird one (to me, perhaps not to my betters):

I have a collection of .ZIP files that are organized into various folders inside of a main folder on my drive. For example:

H:\Documents\July 2012\ABCArchive - July 2012.ZIP
H:\Documents\August 2012\ABCArchive - August 2012.ZIP

And so forth. There are many folders and ZIP archives within this main folder. What I am trying to do is extract each archive into their respective folders to maintain their organization. Because there are so many folders and files, it would be incredibly tedious to go into each folder, right-click each archive and "extract here..."

Each archive has a common string: ABCArchive. My thought was to search within the main folder for "ABCArchive", let the search results populate, select all of the archives at once, right-click and "Extract here" - "here" being, I assume, where the files are actually located.

So that's what I did. WinRAR (and I've also tried this with PeaZIP) chugs along for about two hours and then completes...something...that took two hours. I say this because when I check out any of the folders to ensure the archives were extracted, they were not. The extraction program was obviously extracting the files, but not to the "here" that I assumed it was.

My only idea as to where the files are actually going is the nebulous black hole of the "search results" which is not an actual file location but merely an index of searched files and that perhaps, after the extraction process is complete, the computer decides "yeah, we can't extract these archives here, because here is not a place."

But here's the other strange part: After the extraction process is complete, it appears that the available space on my drive has been reduced, even though there doesn't appear to be any actual extracted files with which to create a reduction.

I hope this makes sense. I could really use some input on this. Thanks in advance to all who took the time.
 

Jiniix

Well-Known Member
https://windirstat.net/
Great software to get an overview of your disk. Might help.

I prefer to use 7zip, I think it's a great piece of software. Also supports CMD commands, which can be tailored to what you need I think.
 

Joshua Brown

New Member
What I thought might be happening is that when I highlight all of the archives from within the search results, right-click and then "extract here" is that perhaps it's extracting all of the archives into whatever ZIP I happen to be hovering over at the time. Which I'd think would increase said archive by a noticeable amount. I did a search for *.ZIP and arranged them by size, but none of their file sizes appear to be out of the expected range. We're talking an archive that would be several hundred gigs. Times however many times I tried doing this. But they're all normal...

Now the goal is to find out where all these files were extracted, remove them (and hopefully keep everything organized) and then find a software solution that actually does what I want. 7zip was one I used back in the day and I'll look into that even more, thanks!
 

Agent Smith

Well-Known Member
In addition to what has been mentioned I highly recommend Everything.exe. This is a very good Windows search replacement and in fact you can turn off indexing in your drives and just use Everything.exe. With Everything.exe you can enter the possible name of the extracted archive and it will find it in an instant.

https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/
 

Joshua Brown

New Member
I've gone through a portion of the folders manually and was able to find where each of the archives (of the many) were extracted to. It appears that if each of the folders (say, 2015's folder) contain 12 additional folders (Jan., Feb., etc.) and each of those folders contain their respective month's ZIP file, that using the search function and extracting the archive from the search results causes WinRAR to extract all of the archives to a random months' folder. There doesn't appear to be, from what I can see so far, any rhyme or reason to which of the folders the extraction program decides to use.

It's odd to me that "extract here" doesn't actually extract THERE - to where each archive is located, and instead just kinda decides on its' own where HERE is based upon, observably...nothing.
 
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