I recently stumbled across an old hard drive image from a 2005 forum backup. Among the debris of broken GIFs and dead PHPBB links was a line that stopped me cold:
The Ghost in the RAR: Searching for Junior Miss Pageant 1999 Series NC7 .part04.rar Junior Miss Pageant 1999 Series NC7 .part04.rar - Google
– This is the tragedy. WinRAR’s split-archive format was the workhorse of the dial-up and early broadband era. You’d see 15 parts: .part01.rar through .part15.rar . Download them all, extract, and you’d get a single .AVI or .MPG file. But if one part is missing—especially .part04 —the whole thing is bricked. No error message in 1999 was more frustrating than "You need the following volume to continue extraction." I recently stumbled across an old hard drive