A corrupt archive recovery engine built in Rust. Fail-forward architecture saves every recoverable file — even from severely damaged ZIP, RAR, 7z, and tar.gz archives.
When archives are corrupted, traditional tools abort the entire extraction. Helix uses fail-forward architecture to save everything that can be saved.
Three recovery engines work together to maximize what gets saved.
Aho-Corasick multi-pattern scan detects 29 file signatures in a single pass — JPEG, PNG, PDF, ZIP, ELF, SQLite, and more.
Bypasses CRC validation errors and continues extracting. One corrupted file doesn't kill the entire archive.
Custom LZMA stream decoder that recovers partial data from corrupted compressed streams instead of aborting.
14 file-type validators check internal structure — PNG chunk integrity, JPEG markers, PDF cross-references, ELF headers.
Define custom file signatures via JSON. Load proprietary formats, niche file types, or internal data structures.
Parse .img/.dd/.raw files with MBR and GPT partition detection. Recover files from forensic disk images.
Memory-mapped sliding window processes multi-gigabyte files without loading them entirely into RAM.
Rayon-powered parallel SHA-256 deduplication. Multi-core acceleration for large recoveries.
Drag-and-drop web interface powered by actix-web. Upload corrupt files and download recovered data instantly.
Three-engine pipeline with automatic fallback and deduplication.
Archives and file types detected by the recovery engine.
Three ways to get Helix Salvager running.
Helix Salvager is free, open-source, and built to handle the archives other tools refuse to touch.