On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 03:44:09PM +0200, Filip Štědronský wrote: > 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 Hello Filip, indeed there is a tool exactly for this purpose. It is called e2image and it's part of the e2fsprogs. The manual page also have some useful examples of how to use it. Good luck. -Lukas
