Backup: TARGET BIGGER THAN DESTINATION

[nick003]

I've just completed a Windows 7 installation on a system with a 120 gig hard drive. I wish to now restore this image to other machines. The problem is that most of the other machines only have 80 gig hard drives.

I know that the installation only uses about 20 gigs of the 120 gig hard drive. The problem comes in where the restore fails because the physical source is bigger than the physical target.

Is there some way that I can backup and restore only the physical space used?

Thanks in advance

Nick

 

[Victor S]

Probably want to look at shrinking the partition before making the image. Images generally are of a partition. There is software that does this shrinking, and I've used it successfully, but I'm not up with it now. Somebody who knows will pitch in.
There could be an issue using the image on a different computer, so you want to look into that before you get an unpleasant surprise. Sysprep is the key word on that.

 

[Mark Phelps]

I've used several products that allow for image backups and restores, and I don't recall any that allow you to shrink the partition size in the process.

Also, unless these other machine have identical hardware to the first machine, you're going to encounter major problems when you try to boot them after doing these "restores".

 

[Kaktussoft]

Use Macrium reflect free for backup and restore. It doesn't have those strange behaviour.
win7 backup/restore only backups/restore space in use btw. But it will remember the partition layout.

Are machines almost identical?

 

[nick003]

All machines are identical. What I want to do is backup only the data in the partition (not the free space) and then restore to another system.

It should work... the data portion is only about 12 gig and I want to restore that to an 80 g

 

[Mark Phelps]

The problem is that the restore action is looking for space equivalent to the allocated SIZE of the backed up partition, not the amount of space that it used. The only way I know to fix this is to shrink the original partition to be small enough to fit on the target drives.