Backup Damaged?

[WantSome]

Hi guys!

I noticed something weird recently...  I back up my forum once a week using the forum maintenance area AS WELL as my cpanel with my host. (Paranoid, possibly).

Today when I downloaded the backup, I went to go and delete some older backups, and all of the ones that I have gotten from the SMF software say they are 0kb in size.  This struck me as rather strange, so I tried to open the backup (yes, first time I've bothered, actually - not so paranoid, possibly ) and it gives me an error:

"The archive is either in an unknown format or damaged."

The download I get from my cpanel is fine, opens fine and shows me the .sql folder inside.  It also downloads in the .gz format, so I'm pretty sure it's not the 'unknown format' but why is it 'damaged'?

Any ideas what this might be?  I plan to upgrade to version 2.0 and if anything goes wrong I really need to know my back-ups are ok.

Thanks!
WS

[Illori]

as long as your backup from your cpanel works you are in good condition. depending on your server configuration the backup in the admin panel may not work or give you an incomplete backup, so it is not really recommended to use as a backup method.

[WantSome]

Thanks Illori. 

Hopefully nothing will go wrong when I upgrade, but I thought to ask before hand just in case.

I'll mark as solved.