For cloud snapshots (AWS EBS, Google Persistent Disk), MBV uses SDKs to list block snapshots and presents them as sparse files.
[5] J. Corbet, “The FUSE filesystem module,” Linux Weekly News , 2005.
[6] ISO/IEC 21320-1:2015, “Information technology — Document Container File — Part 1: Core (ZIP format).”
Independent Researcher CyberForensics Labs City, Country jane.smith@cfl.io multi backup viewer
[8] D. Mazieres, “A Toolkit for User-Level File Systems,” in Proc. USENIX ATC , 2001, pp. 261–274.
[7] Microsoft Corp., “Virtual Hard Disk (VHDX) Specification,” 2012.
[3] B. Callaghan, “NFS over FUSE: A Userspace Filesystem Framework,” ACM Trans. Storage , vol. 12, no. 3, 2016. For cloud snapshots (AWS EBS, Google Persistent Disk),
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.
CIRNode path: string, size: uint64, mtime: timestamp, crc32: uint32, source_backup: id, offset: uint64, // within backup file compression: enum, children: list<CIRNode>
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. 261–274
[2] libarchive developers, “libarchive: Multi-format archive and compression library,” 2023. [Online]. Available: https://libarchive.org.
John A. Doe Department of Computer Science University of Data Engineering City, Country john.doe@ude.edu
[4] Restic Project, “restic: Fast, secure, efficient backup program,” 2023. [Online]. Available: https://restic.net.