Comment by dotancohen
9 hours ago
> 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.
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
Firefox was the only program that was crashing on my "Vmin Shift Instability" bugged CPU. Before I even knew what the culprit was, I filed a bug report with Firefox and the first question they asked me was if my CPU was a Raptor Lake (it was).
This is right. There's a reason people squat domain names that differ from well-known ones by a single bit flip. Think of how many old, shitty phones there are in the world, built using the cheapest available components and running in someone's crumb-filled, humid pocket right next to their magnetic key fob thing.
There's tons of marginal hardware out there, and game developers sometimes push hardware pretty hard and may run early drivers, etc.
As the old saying goes, an untested backup is a non backup.
They said as much in their intro.
Due to a rare defect in our software, sometimes the zip is corrupted.
We blame the user for not backing up, or backing up corrupted files.
That is when I stopped reading.