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How can I extract individual files from a backup created with TWRP? I’ve come across this answer, which is about extracting an APK from the system partition. However, I want to extract files from /data, which gets split across several files in the backup.

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cat data.ext4.win??? | tar xvfi -

What this does is concatenate each file matching the pattern data.ext4.win??? and then pipe the concatenated files to tar for extraction. the - as the filename tells tar to extract from stdin. The i option ignores zero blocks which will be in between each archive file concatenated.

In this example I used the ext4 formatted data partition. Change data.ext4 to match the partition you are extracting.

Edited to reflect davidgo's comment.

31-Jan-2020 Edited to reflect Code Bling's comments.

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    Really cool solution. I used a slightly refined version of this command to ignore the sha1 files - "cat data.ext4.win00? | tar -xv" – davidgo Aug 8 '18 at 8:38
  • This doesn't seem to work for me - it seems these are not standard tar files. i get errors tar: Removing leading /' from member names` and tar: Malformed extended header: missing equal sign. – JonasCz - Reinstate Monica Dec 21 '18 at 19:03
  • It appears you ran into a bug with TWRP, more information here stosb.com/blog/recovering-data-from-a-corrupt-tar-archive – Johnathon Havens Dec 22 '18 at 2:14
  • Is it possible that these files may be piped to tar out of order using this command? – Codebling Aug 15 '19 at 21:56
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    @CodeBling, You are correct, will change the answer to reflect, I must have just been lucky the files I was looking for were in the 000 archive. – Johnathon Havens Feb 1 at 0:02
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The files created by TWRP with a *.win or *.win??? extension are tar archives. If a partition gets split across multiple files, each is a tar archive in its own right. Simply rename each file, giving it a .tar extension, and open it in your favorite archive tool (Engrampa on Ubuntu MATE has worked well for this).

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    On Ubuntu opening them with double click errors: format not supported but I can extract them with tar -xvf And on Windows I can't extract them with 7-Zip unfortunately. – Shayan Aug 5 '19 at 21:05
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Try BinWalk, it's a fast, easy to use tool for analyzing, reverse engineering, and extracting firmware images. and for more information take a look at this Quick-Start-Guide.

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Just extract it with winrar to a folder on desktop and that's it

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