Had first cause to restore something from my Tarsnap backup. I just wanted to retrieve a previous version of a file so I could compare it to the recent one (this was for a document not under version control).
sudo tarsnap -O -x -f backup-1388203256 home/me/docs/document.txt > temp.txt
I didn’t want to over-write the current file so I used the -O option to write to standard out and then redirected to another file. Not difficult, but it was slower to restore than I thought it would be and having to omit the leading slash on the path threw me to start with.