Reverse engineering a custom data file

Posted by kerchingo on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by kerchingo
Published on 2010-03-28T03:53:34Z Indexed on 2010/03/28 5:43 UTC
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At my place of work we have a legacy document management system that for various reasons is now unsupported by the developers. I have been asked to look into extracting the documents contained in this system to eventually be imported into a new 3rd party system.

From tracing and process monitoring I have determined that the document images (mainly tiff files) are stored in a number of 1.5GB files. These files seem to be read from a specific offset and then written to a tmp file that is then served via a web app to the client, and then deleted.

I guess I am looking for suggestions as to how I can inspect these large files that contain the tiff images, and eventually extract and write them to individual files.

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