There should be an easy and obvious way to display those binary logs from the system when it's not running systemd or from another system (IE logs copied from another system).
After scp'ing the logs to the remote machine: journalctl --file copied.log works, assuming it hasn't been encrypted etc.
yep. can you even access journald logs if you're booted up with a rescue disk? (genuine question, i don't know the answer but figure it's one of the things i need to know)
If the journal is being kept on disk, then yes, journalctl --directory /var/journal/ will work. I'm not terribly happy with the current implementation of journal. Having a structured, fast, searchable, all in one journal is a lovely goal however. -- -- Clinton Roy, Software Engineer with Bloomberg L.P.