…that 7-zip has some trouble with .tar.gz files.
As I posted earlier I moved web hosting and since it was a sudden unexpected move the most recent backup was a few days old, but it’s not like I post much so it was probably fine.
As every time I need a backup, I was thankful I do automatic backups hosted offsite (two times a week, to Dropbox in this case)
So I grabbed the most recent backup, which by now was one week old and extracted it.
Absent mindedly uploaded the files by ftp while I created the mysql databases and users, when the upload finished I went to the site URL and…nothing worked.
“WTF?”
I looked at the ftp client and noticed it uploaded only 80 files.
Folders like wp-includes, wp-content and others simply weren’t there.
“Ah crap, guess the latest backup is corrupted.”
So I downloaded the previous one, do the same and…same folders are missing.
Decided to look at a (much) older backup that was a zip file, everything was there and the file size had perhaps 2 or 3MB of difference compared to the more recent .tar.gz.
“Something is fishy here.”
On a completely “LOL, dunno what to do” moment I try to extract the most recent backup with WinRar.
All the files were there.
God damn it 7-zip, I trusted you!!
So, TL;DR: heed my sage advice: if you run a website, do automatic offsite backups at least a couple of times per week and don’t use 7-zip to open .tar.gz files.