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  • 5
    Nice! Do you also have the equivalent of "pack" (to take the uncompressed directory tree and create a .db file)? Commented May 3, 2015 at 23:46
  • 7
    Could you add an explanation to the answer.? Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 9:23
  • 33
    Explanation: author creates a standard Zlib file header for a .tar.gz file with printf command (0x1F 0x8B is a signature, 0x08 is the compression method, 0x00 are flags and 4 x 0x00 is timestamp), then appends to this header the contents of backup.ab file, starting from offset 25d. Such stream is a valid .tar.gz file, and the tar xfvz command recognizes it as such, so it can successfully uncompress the stream. Commented Jun 12, 2016 at 7:31
  • 6
    I made a backup with adb 1.0.36 (Revision 1.7.0.0+r33-2) and this method produced an error from zgip: invalid compressed data--format violated Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 19:42
  • 3
    2x faster using dd than tail on my laptop: (printf "\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00" && dd if=backup.ab bs=1M iflag=skip_bytes skip=24) | tar ztv Commented May 25, 2020 at 18:57