Looking to unPaq files
January 21, 2012 11:44 AM Subscribe
I am looking for information about decompressing "MediaPaq" archives, with .paq extensions. I am finding the Internet surprisingly silent.
In a move to cloudify all of my old media, I finally gave in and bought a Zip drive on eBay to help me upload all my old Zip disks. Perfect. All uploaded, problem solved.
But not quite...
Two of the disks have files in .paq format that came from a package called "MediaPaq" or "MediaPack". It was a means to compress and store photos etc. Bad idea.
So, I've got a lot of my early digital photos .paq'ed up and would like to get them back. Windows says that .paq files are HP restore files, but these aren't those. I can't really find any other good information about how to unpack these. I would even settle for having the app itself that encoded them, so I could run it and unpack them back to whatever they were before. I tried changing the extension to .zip but that didn't fly.
Upside - I did find my first-ever digital photo, taken in March 1997, which I had not compressed. It was a picture of a tray of ravioli air-drying on the stovetop in my old place in Chicago. I had a tin of Guinness on the go.
In a move to cloudify all of my old media, I finally gave in and bought a Zip drive on eBay to help me upload all my old Zip disks. Perfect. All uploaded, problem solved.
But not quite...
Two of the disks have files in .paq format that came from a package called "MediaPaq" or "MediaPack". It was a means to compress and store photos etc. Bad idea.
So, I've got a lot of my early digital photos .paq'ed up and would like to get them back. Windows says that .paq files are HP restore files, but these aren't those. I can't really find any other good information about how to unpack these. I would even settle for having the app itself that encoded them, so I could run it and unpack them back to whatever they were before. I tried changing the extension to .zip but that didn't fly.
Upside - I did find my first-ever digital photo, taken in March 1997, which I had not compressed. It was a picture of a tray of ravioli air-drying on the stovetop in my old place in Chicago. I had a tin of Guinness on the go.
Open one in Notepad and read the header (first hundred+ bytes of the file). It may give a clue. Perhaps you can post it or memail it. Most old uncommon archive formats were based on ARC or ZIP or LZH even if they used their own special extension.
posted by caclwmr4 at 12:27 PM on January 21, 2012
posted by caclwmr4 at 12:27 PM on January 21, 2012
Another thought! Change the extension to JPG and open one in any/every graphics program you have. The first JPG in the file might display without problem. Try with every graphics program you have. ACDSee Classic is great for this if you have it.
JPG files really don't compress, and your PAQ might have been only some kind of album format that did not actually apply compression. If so, one way or another the original files can be extracted or separated out.
posted by caclwmr4 at 12:48 PM on January 21, 2012
JPG files really don't compress, and your PAQ might have been only some kind of album format that did not actually apply compression. If so, one way or another the original files can be extracted or separated out.
posted by caclwmr4 at 12:48 PM on January 21, 2012
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by bdk3clash at 12:07 PM on January 21, 2012