Clone to smaller drive

[wingman1800]

I have tried EaseUs todo...... and apparently it has built in compression and will clone to a slightly smaller drive , apparently Acronis 2014 will not. I have a 1.5 TB drive in desk top but it is only 1/2 used , but I am having trouble cloning to a empty 1 TB drive. I thing it might be because even tho I dont have much data, the partions take up the entire 1.5 desktop drive. Is this normal and if so what programs will automaticly clone to a smaller disk.
p.s I do not want to get into a discussion about imaging etc.... just cloning
thank you
tom

 

[Prof Kerfuffle]

Hi there,

You are trying to copy 750GB of data on a 1.5TB partition to a 1TB HDD? Is that correct?

What the cloning software is doing as you noted is copying the entire partition even if it's empty data. Macrium Reflect - Free can copy part of the partition and resize it to fit onto a small drive. (When I say part I mean the 750GB of data you have used and it will ignore the blank space.)

 

[wingman1800]

yes, this is exactly what I want to do, do you know of any other programs other than Macrium that will do this??
thanks for the insight
tom

 

[rvcjew]

acronis will do this i do it all the time for work. are you backing up acronis with full backup scheme or incremental? you need to use full and don't do it sector by sector then just restore it to the disk you want and do not do universal restore.
EDIT also do not restore the disk signature.

 

[4wd]

Just a comment about Easeus (6.1), quote from their website:

6. Large hard drive can be cloned to small hard drive so long as the capacity of destination hard drive is equal or larger than the used space of original hard drive.

Have done this, no problems. Untick 'sector by sector clone', and it will only clone sectors containing any information. Good luck.