002 File Documentation
Summary
A .002 file is the second part of a file split into numbered volumes (.001, .002, .003…) so a large file could be sent or stored in pieces. It has no format of its own and no MIME type beyond application/octet-stream. You never open the .002 directly: put every part in one folder and open the first one, the .001, in 7-Zip, WinRAR or PeaZip, which rejoins the set automatically. If any part is missing the set cannot be reassembled.
Technical details
| Feature | Value |
|---|---|
| Full name | Split file / multi-volume archive — second part |
| File extension | .002 |
| MIME type | application/octet-stream |
| Format type | Raw byte segment of a larger file; not a standalone format |
| Position in set | Second segment, after .001, before .003 |
| Header / signature | None — the header lives in the .001 |
| Created by | 7-Zip, WinRAR, PeaZip, HJSplit and other splitters |
| Open with | The .001, opened in an archiver (never the .002) |
| Two variants | Split archive (.7z.001…) or plainly split file (.001…) |
| Reassembled by | Extracting or joining from the first part |
| Set requirement | All parts present and consecutively numbered |
| Safe to delete alone | No — deleting any part breaks the whole set |
| Related extensions | .001, .003, .zip, .rar, .7z, .z01 |
What is a 002 file?
A .002 file is not a file format. It is the second piece of a single larger file that was split into numbered volumes: .001, .002, .003, and so on. Splitting is done to slip a big file under an email or upload size limit, to fit it onto size-limited media, or to make a large download easier to resume. The naming convention has no single owner; 7-Zip, WinRAR, PeaZip, HJSplit and many other tools all produce .001/.002 sets.
The one fact that explains every question about a .002 is this: it holds only the raw middle bytes of the original file, with no header of its own to tell software what it belongs to or how the pieces fit. Double-clicking it fails because there is nothing self-describing to open. The recognisable header, the archive signature and the index all live in the first part, the .001.
Split archive versus plainly split file
Two different situations produce a .002, and the difference decides what you do with it.
A split archive is a compressed archive created in multi-volume mode. You get names like backup.7z.001, backup.7z.002, or data.zip.001, data.zip.002. The archive header (7z BC AF 27 1C for 7-Zip, PK for ZIP, Rar! for RAR) sits at the start of the .001. You extract the set by opening that first part with the matching archiver, which reads the sibling volumes automatically.
A plainly split file is any single file, a video, an ISO, one big archive, cut into raw byte chunks by a splitter such as HJSplit or 7-Zip’s “Split file” command. There is no compression: movie.mkv.001, movie.mkv.002 are simply the file’s bytes in order. Here you rejoin the parts back into the original rather than extract them. Either way, you start from the .001.
Reassembling the set from the .001
Put every part in one folder with consistent names, then open the first one. For a split archive, right-click file.7z.001 and choose Extract in 7-Zip, WinRAR or PeaZip; the tool detects .002, .003 and the rest and stitches them together before decompressing. For a plainly split file, the same tools (or HJSplit’s Join) concatenate the parts back into the original. On Linux the raw join is a single command:
cat file.001 file.002 file.003 > file # rejoin a plain split
7z x archive.7z.001 # extract a split archiveThe order matters: the parts must be concatenated in numeric sequence, because each one continues exactly where the previous ended.
Why a missing part cannot be recovered
If any part is missing, the set will not reassemble and the absent bytes cannot be reconstructed. This is not a tool limitation; the data simply is not there. A missing .001 is the worst case, because it carries the header and index the archiver needs to even begin. A missing middle volume breaks the byte stream at that point. There is no way to “open the .002 alone” to salvage part of the content, because without the surrounding volumes there is no valid file structure to parse. The only fix is to obtain the missing pieces: re-download or re-request the complete run of parts.
References
- 7-Zip — split and extract multi-volume archives
- PeaZip — open-source archiver (split / join)
- WinRAR / RARLAB — official site
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