Esem / Eesn

mtftar on osx 10.6 snow leopard

July 20th, 2011, around noon

I tend to keep files for an eternity and some of them go way back to no longer supported formats, or different operating systems altogether. This short post is about opening Windows Backup .bkf files on OSX Snow Leopard.

I did end up with a 20GB .bkf file that I could not open on my Mac so after some googling, I found mtftar. It's a nifty little utility to translate .bkf files to the tape archiver format (tar). Trouble is, it did not compile on OSX. But an hour later, after sourcing various files from here and there, and making little tweaks for 10.6, I have what looks like an 64 bit intel command line binary for OSX Snow Leopard. In the spirit of the intertubes, I offer my copy to those in need. It includes a precompiled binary and source files.

The disclaimer:
I am not affiliated with neither the original mtf author, nor the one behind mtftar. I cannot and will not offer any support for this. It will very likely not work on OSX 10.5 and older. It will most likely not run on OSX 10.7. It does not work on PowerPC. Probably not necessary, but you may need the developer tools installed.

Got that above? Download: mtftar.osx.10.6.zip

Copying from the readme:
mtftar is most often used as a filter, as in:
mtftar < MyBackup.bkf | tar xvf -

p.s. I originally got mtftar from here.

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Comments:

IKEA says:

Thank you very much for this!
I attempted to compile the original, but did not work.
After very little searching around, I found this.
I hope it works as expected...
(Haven't used it yet, will later)
It's lucky you've made this, not to long ago by the looks of it!

Again, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

posted: August 3rd, 2011, at noon
darrennie says:

Thanks for the effort, can't wait to try.

posted: September 13th, 2011, late at night
p.a.c. says:

I really appreciate you posting the build, it's a huge time saver.

posted: December 30th, 2011, late at night
Stu says:

Very nice! Much appreciated.
Now if only it worked on MS SQL Server .bak files... but that is an exercise best left to the original mtftar author.

posted: January 17th, 2012, late at night
John LeMasney says:

Thanks so much!! I really appreciate the effort.

posted: April 10th, 2012, late at night
Dave says:

It works on 10.7. Thank you.

posted: May 16th, 2012, late at night
paul says:

Can someone please explain how to use this? Thanks in advance.

posted: October 4th, 2012, in the evening

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