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dotancohen • yesterday at 9:07 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

  > recently we had a particularly bad case: a customer sent us an approximately 1 GB project file which was corrupt, for a game already published to Steam, which they'd spent months working on. They told us all their backups were corrupt too... Predictably, WinRAR's repair tool produced a 1 GB ZIP file that contained nothing.
Thirty years of creating and storing zip files on every major and some minor OSes, filesystems, sketchy transfer protocols, and unreliable media make me think that the huge number of issues this company has with corrupted ZIP files has nothing to do with the format or with its customers' bad practices. I think their software might just produce bad zip files.

Replies

matja • yesterday at 11:02 PM

The more popular your software is, the more likely you'll get bug reports from people with just bad hardware. I know a few applications now that perform a simple memory/CPU test when sending a bug report and reject those that are basically impossible.

E.g.: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252971

toast0 • yesterday at 10:25 PM

There's tons of marginal hardware out there, and game developers sometimes push hardware pretty hard and may run early drivers, etc.

BatFastard • yesterday at 10:18 PM

As the old saying goes, an untested backup is a non backup.