railway volume files list does need a running service. The railway volume files commands find the volume through the service it is attached to in the selected environment, and they need that service to have an active deployment. They do not connect to a stored volume directly, so they will not work while the service is stopped with no deployment.

Thank you. We cannot start the service or its bootstrap entrypoint, because the failed volume must remain preserved.

Is there a Railway-supported alternative for offline, read-only volume metadata inspection without starting any deployment/container or modifying filesystem data/metadata?

If no such mechanism exists, please confirm that limitation explicitly. Could a Railway team member clarify this?

This remains a guidance-only request; no resource changes are authorized.

We don't have a supported way to inspect a volume offline. Our volume file tools, railway volume files and railway volume browse, work through the service the volume is attached to and need that service to have an active deployment. Neither one reads a stopped volume directly.

We also don't inspect volumes, or pull metadata from them, on a customer's behalf. That means there is no Railway-provided way to get mount-root ownership, permissions, symlink status, mount options or a directory listing from a volume whose service is stopped without starting a deployment.

Our documentation doesn't say what happens at the filesystem level during a mount, such as journal recovery or metadata writes, so we can't confirm whether either occurs.