[weblacky]

Also since, Irix doesn’t support any loopback image mounting (which I always felt was a real oversight given what xfs was trying to become) your shortest path would be relying on the fact that a restored file system doesn’t normally need to be correctly sized to a volume or partition that is larger than it’s original volume or partition.

Just get a larger disk, use Irix to create the partition / volume layout, then use Irix tools to xfsrestore into the main data partition.

As long as you have more room than you need, I don’t see why it won’t work. All the file systems I’ve worked with so far work just fine even when undersized for the disk they have been restored to, as long as they start correctly at the beginning of the partition/volume where the magic number identification can take place.

You should still be able to read it and pick through the data, I just wouldn’t attempt filesystem repairs in case the utilities in Irix attempt to resize the underlying xfs file system to the large partition/volume.


Also, I’ll put this out there, situations like these seem to walk a fine line between the utility of keeping the xfs format instead of using tar archives.

I’d recommend (for future use) only doing xfs backups that need to preserve filesystem properties on restore (user IDs, acls, xfs Metadata, or bootablity).

Otherwise, if the backup had been done using tar, then you could have opened it on many platforms and picked out the files you wanted.

I’ve learned the hard way that’s while you think a platform is going to be supported, it’s later removed and now it’s more work than you expected.

Consider just xfsrestore and then tarballing everything. Then you can look through your tarball on whatever platform/software you feel comfortable with.