Where the words are one tall drink of water.

When trying to update my Synology DS209 from my Mac (10.6 Snow Leopard) I ran in to the following problem: I would download the zip file from Synology, and double-click on the zip file to unpackage it. OS X’s ArchiveManager application would unpackage the zip file in to a directory instead of to a .pat file.

The short version is that ArchiveManager decompresses the zip file, and finds the .pat file within. It then analyzes the .pat file and recognizes it as a Unix tar archive which it also knows how to unpack. Without prompting, it continues to unpackage the .pat file as well (which is what you need to send the DiskStation as an update).

How I worked-around this: start the terminal applicaiton, ‘cd’ to the directory where you stored your .zip file, and run ‘unzip’ on the archive. Unzip will only decompress the outer-most zip archive, and leave the .pat file available for upload to your DiskStation.


$ cd Desktop
$ ls synology*.zip
synology_88f6281_209_1141.zip
$ unzip synology_88f6281_209_1141.zip
Archive: synology_88f6281_209_1141.zip
inflating: synology_88f6281_209_1141.pat
$ file synology_88f6281_209_1141.pat
synology_88f6281_209_1141.pat: POSIX tar archive (GNU)