Archive file corruption

Archive files have a header and a record structure. The records include data and auxiliary information to index the records and to link the records together for fast data access.

All data is susceptible to corruption if a system failure such as a power outage occurs. When archive file corruption occurs and the file becomes unreadable, it is important to recover the file to the most complete state possible.

Use the offline archive utility piarchss to recover the data and rebuild the archive header and its associated metadata.