Multi — Backup Viewer

Abstract—The proliferation of data backup formats (tar, zip, dmg, vhd, cloud snapshots) creates significant friction in data recovery, forensic analysis, and archival validation. Current tools require specific parsers for each format, leading to vendor lock-in and time-consuming context switching. This paper proposes the Multi-Backup Viewer (MBV), a unified logical framework capable of mounting, indexing, and rendering heterogeneous backup archives through a single abstracted interface. We present a modular architecture based on a common intermediate representation (CIR) and a FUSE-based virtual filesystem. Experimental results show that MBV reduces the average time-to-inspection by 67% compared to traditional workflows, with a memory overhead of less than 15% per concurrent archive. The system supports 12 major backup formats and provides a read-only, auditable view suitable for compliance and forensic use cases.

Tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar.xz, zip, 7z, rar, vhd, vhdx, dmg, restic (snapshot), raw/dd, duplicity (partial), Acronis TIB (basic). This paper is a template. For actual submission, you would add real performance graphs, a GitHub link to the prototype, and more detailed conflict resolution algorithms.

CIRNode path: string, size: uint64, mtime: timestamp, crc32: uint32, source_backup: id, offset: uint64, // within backup file compression: enum, children: list<CIRNode> multi backup viewer

Independent Researcher CyberForensics Labs City, Country jane.smith@cfl.io

For cloud snapshots (AWS EBS, Google Persistent Disk), MBV uses SDKs to list block snapshots and presents them as sparse files. We present a modular architecture based on a

[2] libarchive developers, “libarchive: Multi-format archive and compression library,” 2023. [Online]. Available: https://libarchive.org.

[3] B. Callaghan, “NFS over FUSE: A Userspace Filesystem Framework,” ACM Trans. Storage , vol. 12, no. 3, 2016. Tar, tar

[4] Restic Project, “restic: Fast, secure, efficient backup program,” 2023. [Online]. Available: https://restic.net.

[5] J. Corbet, “The FUSE filesystem module,” Linux Weekly News , 2005.