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Recovering data from multi-disk ZIP archives

Last year, I wrote about how I had recently been imaging and archiving my old 3.5-inch floppy disks from the late '80s to mid-'90s. Quite a number of those disks contain multi-disk ZIP archives, made by the original PKZIP.

This post is a short one about the steps I figured out to extract them using zip and unzip from the Info-ZIP package. (The unzip and zip that are installed by default on macOS.)

To extract files from multi-part ZIP archives (the ones with volume labels like PKBACK# 001, etc), perform the following steps:

  1. Rename the original zip files (from the individual disk volumes) to <name>.z01, <name>.z02, etc.
  2. Run: zip -FF <name>.z01 --out <name>.zip
    1. Answer n when it asks: Is this a single-disk archive? (y/n):
    2. Answer e (end) when it complains that it could not find <name>.z0n (where n is one higher than the last file number).
  3. Run unzip <name>.zip

You should now have all the files in the combined archive.