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Re: Macrium Reflect Free - Restoring to a smaller drive
In reply to skyglider,
4 months ago
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skyglider wrote:
tcg550 wrote:
The easiest way to do it is resize the partitions before the image is created.
Use Easeus Partition Master(free) to resize so your partition totals are less than the new drive. Leave the extra free space at the end of the drive.
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm
A hassle, I know, but it will be faster and easier than trying to straighten out the whole boot partition thing.
Hi tcg550,
I'm testing the restore to insure that backups being made for years until the system internal hard drive fails are not for nothing. As such, I want to backup and restore the entire HDD just as my friend will be doing until her drive fails.
Being able to restore to a smaller hard drive has two reasons for me:
You could also try Easeus Disk Copy that may or may not copy the entire drive without resizing.
I'll try the Easeus backup after I try Bob Collette's suggestion (in another thread) of using a free Seagate branded version of Acronis backup. My lady friend is using a Seagate external 2TB drive to hold her backups so should be eligible to use it.
A lot of people still partition for organizational purposes but there really is no more need for partitioning drives anymore.
I wonder how many folks backup their systems without actually testing the restore to insure it works?
If this is a one time thing the fastest error free way is to resize the partitions and use Macrium or Easeus. The least steps are resize partition use Easeus Dskcopy with a boot disk.
I don't want to alter her original drive until I have a known working backup of the whole thing.
Thanks for your suggestions,
Sky
It appears we all may be talking about different things. Macrium Reflect and Easus Disk Copy are used for disaster recovery or cloning disks to new drives.
You may want to look at back software and managing each partition's backup individually. If no other reason, as you can see, it will be difficult at best to restore the entire drive with multiple partitions to a smaller one.
Another option to try is just image the operating or system partition and restore that to the new drive. Once you are able to boot the new drive just copy the data from the other partitions with something like Syncback. At that point you can do away with the partitions and copy each one into it's own folder. That will make cloning the drive in the future much easier with only one partition.
Whatever you come up with as a solution please post your results so others will benefit from your experience.
You are also wise to test your method before you actually need it. Many people do not and are left with useless backups.
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