Hello, I have experienced several mysterious ext4 issues on remote machines with poor internet connection (mobile broadband) that are not easily physically accessible. I would like to download the filesystem image from the remote machine for local investigation but the partition is rather large (500GB in one instance) and I cannot easily upload that much data over the mobile connection. Is there any way to extract only filesystem metadata (superblock, inodes, directory data blocks, etc.) from the partition but not file data blocks? Ideally so that I could then reconstruct an identical filesystem image, only with file data blocks zeroed out. It seems it should be straightforwad to write such a tool but before I start doing so, I wanted to check whether somebody hasn't already written one. (It seems this might be a common enough need when debugging and developing filesystems.) Short googling around and searching list archive did not reveal anything. Thanks for any pointers. Filip Stedronsky
