LXD import from barebones export - without backup.yaml

After a catastrophic loss of data, I am trying to recover an old container backup. I am not entirely sure how it was made, but am fairly sure it was done using basic commands through lxc or lxd.
The backup is from June 2021, and it was running on the current Ubuntu LTS at the time of the backup.
I have the following files and folders

container.bin
index.yaml
snapshots/...

where snapshots are also .bin files.

Contents of index.yaml:

$ cat index.yaml 
name: ost
backend: zfs
pool: lxd
snapshots:
- snapshot-20210616-0
- snapshot-20210616-1
- snap0
- snap1
- snap2
- snap3
- snap4
- snap5
- snap6
- snap7
- snap8
- snap9
optimized: true
optimized_header: false
type: container

Iā€™m just looking to get access to the files within these snapshots, not necessarily to run the container. How do I do it?
edited for formatting

Those .bin files are optimized export dumps (created using zfs send) and will be the differences between each earlier snapshot and the current volume.

Probably the easiest way to get access to them is to import the tarball using lxc import and then start the container up.

See https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/master/backup/#instance-backups

Ah okay.
I was using lxc image import, and had convinced myself that lxc import did not work either without actually trying.
After recreating prior devices and profiles, it has imported and the container starts. Amazing.

Many thanks.

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