Restore backup on a Mac?

We have a RHEL 5 server creating daily backups with xtrabackup of our MySQL 5.0 DBs. I wanted to bring the archive over to test on an OS X machine running MySQL 5.0 and the percona binaries for os x, but from this page it looks like you must use the tar -i option to decompress the archive which Lion chokes on (maybe because it’s BSD tar)?

Anyone try this before?