Does anyone know how to use Retropect back soft ware - I need help with it

Question

Is there anyone familiar with Retrospect Backup software here who might be able to help me with the following problem ?
My 2007 iMac  with the tiger 10.4.11 OS suddenly crashed exactly two weeks ago when I told the trash to empty. The reason was that some malware or virus had appeared on my computer. There was an alias icon on the desktop that linked to a core item in the system folder; that is why it crashed. It was the malware that put it there somehow.
So, I was left with a dead computer without an operating system to make it work.
I telephoned Applecare for help as I was clueless as to what to do. Because I can’t write the thousands of words here to describe the ghastly experience Applecare have been I will miss that out for the time being. Suffice to say it has been utterly excruciating and horrible and I have so far lost all my data, including all the software I have ever bought, because of them. That’s 23 years of writing stuff onto to all the previous Macs I’ve owned.
So, the question is this. I have a Retrospect backup software backup in my external hard disk. This should still have all my information on as it was a backup made just the day before the computer crashed.
But I no longer have the Retrospect software on either my external hard disk or on the computer, so when I double click on the Retrospect icon in the external hard disk I get a message asking me to find the application software to open it with. I haven’t got it ( thanks to applecare’s utter incompetence).
Applecare had insisted that I would be able to retrieve my data from this backup if they installed Snow Leopard to make the computer work. But when I tried to do this the computer crashed again and I was left without an OS again.  Yet another visit to the ‘genius’ bar (what a joke) at the Applestore and this time they installed Leopard which ended up leaving me without any data at all.
The Retrospect support people told me that I could only retrieve information from this backup if the computer had the original Operating system, i.e. OS Tiger 10.4.11.
The question is, can anybody here tell me exactly how to retrieve a Retrospect backup from my external hard disk, because so far, both Applecare & Retrospect support have not been of any help at all really and I have spent every waking minute of the past two weeks trying to sort out this problem without any success so far.
Help !

Answer 1

The Retrospect you used way back when is no longer around. The company was sold and that company produced a new version of Retrospect - Retrospect 8.x
So, as you've been told, you would have to be running a Tiger system with an old version of Retrospect software (5.x or 6.x - you would need to know) assuming you can find the software.
As best I can remember you cannot extract files from a Retrospect backup except using the software since Retrospect did not normally make a file by file backup rather it created an archive of the files in the backup. I'm assuming that the EMC/Retrospect people have told you that old Retrospect backups are not accessible by Retrospect 8.x?