This is a "low-tech extractor" – sloppy but effective for plain-text secrets. It won't recover structured configs (like order of firewall rules), but it gets the job done in an emergency.
Before diving into extraction, it is crucial to understand what we are extracting. MikroTik RouterOS offers two primary methods for saving your router's state. While they are often confused, they serve very different purposes.
RouterOS v7.15+ introduced /export compact and /export hide-sensitive , but the .backup format remains proprietary. The open-source community is playing catch-up.
If you have access to any MikroTik device (even a different one), you can try to restore the backup and then export as .rsc .