A developer recovered a 22 GiB chain of Acronis True Image (.tib) backups from 2008 on Linux by reverse engineering the legacy binary format and writing a read-only Go parser called tib-recover. The post details the full process: imaging the original disk with ddrescue, dissecting the tagged-field container format, understanding how incremental snapshots use logical offsets and catalogs, handling incomplete final backups, and implementing safety-oriented extraction. The tool recovered 15,696 files from the newest complete snapshot. An optional index cache reduces repeated full-chain scans from ~137 seconds to under 1 second. The tool is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub, but is limited to the specific legacy file-level TIB variant encountered.
