Comment 17 for bug 692848

I see this has been reproduced on a small filesystem, but for future reference xfs
has a utility called xfs_metadump that helps in these situations. It grabs just the
metadata, so it results in a relatively small file, and the file can then be exploded back
into a sparse image of the original filesystem.

# xfs_metadump /dev/sda1 sda1.meta
# xfs_mdrestore sda1.meta sda1.img
# mount -o loop sda1.img /mnt

Should alleviate some of the pain in having to reproduce the issue on a new filesystem.