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Can no longer image to smaller Drive.

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I've been using Acronis True home Image for around 6 or 7 years now as a part of my business, I primarily use it as a backup system for my clients and to image from drive to drive, most recently SATA to SSD, I create an image to my drive, then image from my drive to the new drive.

 

Over the last week I have discovered that I am unable to image from say a 500GB drive that has a disk usage of 140GB, over to a drive with a capacity of 240GB, yet I have been doing this for years with no issues, what is going on?

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Mark, welcome to these public User Forums.

The most likely cause is that your source drive either has some unmoveable data or else has some bad sectors that will cause Acronis to switch to using sector-by-sector mode which will always give a significantly larger backup image.

Download the MVP Log Viewer tool (link below) and check the backup log to see if this tells of why the backup / recovery fails or is larger?

Running CHKDSK /F on the source disk is also recommended.

Thank you for the welcome.

 

The source drive was successfully backed up to an image, the source drive is a 480GB SSD, the size of the image backed up from that drive is 124GB, normally I would have no problem recovering this image to a smaller drive, in this case a 240GB SSD, however when selected in the drop down it states that it cannot backup to this drive, I had the exact same problem with a totally different image recovery last week.

The backing up to an image is working fine, recovering the image to a smaller drive is the issue, I've been doing it for years, as long as the image is smaller than the drive it is recovering to, it has always worked.

Mark, can you obtain and post the logs from both the backup from the original source drive, and your attempt to recover that backup image to the smaller target drive?  Without that type of information, it is difficult to do more than guess at what is happening here?

Logs would be helpful to help identify the cause.

Also, is the smaller drive initialized and viewable in windows explorer? Some new drives are not initialized and won't be usable until they are.

Are you trying to restore from Windows or rescue media?

Is your rescue media Linux, winpe or WinRE?

Mark, is the 124 GB backup size the size of the .tib file itself or is it the amount of data backed up (before compression). Just wondering if after decompression the data exceeds the drive.

I suggest using the Acronis mount function (right-click on the .tib, select Acronis True Image->mount). Look at the Used Space number. (You may need to Choose Columns to get it.) On my C: drive, the Used Space is 146.7 GB but the .tib file is only 66.6 GB.