View zipped file without unzipping?

Most modern Windows systems will open a ZIP file so you can see its contents.  WinZip and 7Zip are both great products that do this as well.

That said, 233GB is huge and I expect this would be a very slow operation.

I double clicked on the file this morning around 9am.   It's now 3:27pm and it still hasn't finished opening it..... round and round the little circle goes.   I'm ready to find another solution... or just go home and see what's showing in the morning.  <smile>

Yeah, you're going to want to do this from the most capable machine you have.  Whatever has the most RAM and free hard drive space.

Frankly, you might be better off extracting the files to see what's inside.

Try WinZip (even a trial version). It is good at opening large ZIP files. I do this quite a bit. As noted 7Zip also works well.

250 GB is a huge file so it will take a long time  (could be 8 hours thereabouts on a disk-based machine.

Also take a copy of the file and make sure it is a good file. It could be stuck (your post) if not a good zip file.

In case you know the file names or the path, you can try extracting using unzip (if the zipped file is *.zip):
unzip <yourfile>.zip <name of file(s) you want to extract with space>
e.g.
unzip abc.zip nbn ten/nine
will extract, files nbn and ten/nine
or
unzip abc.zip "*ama*"
will extract all file with wild card ama e.g. sama samal nuama etc.

Did the unzip finish?  Enough time has elapsed.

Use on of EE tool

ZipGrep is a utility that can list zip archives of various kinds, including .zip, .war, .ear, .jar and so on. It can also search (to the deepest level of archive nesting) inside the archive for patterns of text without the need to extract the archive's contents.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/tools/zip-grep.html

LOL!   I had to use the external drive to do a system backup last night.   I had to cancel..... I'm downloading WinZip now and will try that.

Tried WinZip.... but got an error:  Too many entries in central directory according to end of central directory info.   Cannot open file '2016-10-07.zip'.  It does not appear to be a valid archive.   If you downloaded this file, try downloading the file again.

This zip file was created by BackUpAssist software - .   The BackupAssist software was updated and can no longer read the catalog for the old backups.   I used to be able just to click on the zipped file and it would allow me to view the contents and extract just what I needed.    I suspect 7Zip works the same way?

Based on your last post, it looks like a corrupted file. If you can get a replacement, I would do that.

Try WinMount, it mount the zip file as a virtual disk, and you can access files one by one without extract them.

All of my old backup files gave me the same issue, so it must be that they are just too large to open.   I've chosen a different format in BackUpAssist to perform the backups.  All is well now.   Hope I never need these old backups!