Power Archiver not including files when creating zip.

[yetanotherid]

I recently installed Power Archiver 9.11 on a fresh install of XP SP2 to try it out. I really like the program, but don’t seem to be able to trust it.
For some reason, when I select a group of folders to compress (each containing a few small files), Power Archiver creates a zip file containing the folders in question, but none of them contain the actual files. The first time it happened I thought I’d just made some sort of error, but now I have a group of folders on which I can constistently duplicate the problem. Yet any other groups of folders I try to compress seems to work fine.
I’ve tried moving the particular folder group to the root of the drive and compressing them from there, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. I have found that if I right click on the root folder (the one containing all the sub folders), then Power Archiver compresses everything fine. However if I navigate into the root folder, select all the sub folders, then right click to create a zip file, Power Archiver creates a zip file containing the folders but none of the files they contain. There’s about 65 folders that I’m trying to compress, but they all contain pretty small files. I’ve even tried just selecting a few of them but the problem still exists. What I’m finding really hard to understand is that I can consistently reproduce the problem on this one group of folders, yet for the moment everything else I try to compress seems to work fine.

Hopefully I explained all that well.
Has anyone else experiences this behaviour?

Thanks,
Darren

[yetanotherid]

Okay, just as I was hitting the submit button on the above post I developed a theory. I’ve tested it and now seem to think I’ve found the bug, but if someone else could test it out too that would be great.
The group of folders I was trying to compress were all named after the version of the files they contained. So each folder was called something like “Program.1.3.5”. I can only assume that the “.” in the file name is causing Power Archiver to treat the folders as files, and it therefore doesn’t look inside them. To confirm this theory I renamed a few of them, removing the version number so there were no "."s in the name. I then recompressed the group of folders and sure enough, all the ones I’d renamed contained files but none of the rest did.
So for now I know not to use Power Archiver, and I’ll have to walk away from the computer for a while so I can come back to it in a less distressed state, when hopefully I’ll be in a better frame of mind to sort out all the files I’ve lost since installing it.

[manuangi]

the best thing you can do is share those folders with us, uploading them on the web, so that we may download them and look about the problem.

[yetanotherid]

@manuangi:

the best thing you can do is share those folders with us, uploading them on the web, so that we may download them and look about the problem.

There shouldn’t be a need for that. It’s a pretty simple bug to reproduce.
Just create a couple of folders. Call one “test.01” and the other “test.02”
Stick a couple of files in each folder. Now select both folders and compress them from the right click menu. The resulting zip file will contain the folders, but the folders won’t contain any files. Now rename the folders to “test” and “testing”. Compress them again and everything will be fine.

I’ve uninstalled 9.11 and installed 9.1
Run the tests again and the bug is no longer present.

Although……
I was testing the folders on the root of my C drive. When compressing them with the older version (9.1), it insisted in trying to include the hyberfil.sys file in the archive, even though it wasn’t selected. But that’s another story…

[manuangi]

@yetanotherid:

There shouldn’t be a need for that. It’s a pretty simple bug to reproduce.
Just create a couple of folders. Call one “test.01” and the other “test.02”
Stick a couple of files in each folder. Now select both folders and compress them from the right click menu. The resulting zip file will contain the folders, but the folders won’t contain any files. Now rename the folders to “test” and “testing”. Compress them again and everything will be fine.

YOU ARE RIGHT! :eek:
I could reproduce the bug.

So, PA fails to include any files in folders named with a point in their name, but just when compressing to ZIP.
I tried to compress to other types like CAB, 7Z, BH and all worked fine.

Using 9.11.01

[yetanotherid]

Cheers,
Thanks for confirming it!
I didn’t actually check any of the other formats. I was using version 9.11.01 myself. It seems that’s the only version with the problem.

Thanks,
Darren

[spwolf]

thanks - we will check it out!