Restoring Acronis image to smaller partition?

I back up my System Reserved partition + C partition with Acronis True Image WD, creating the images on separate external USB drives.

My question is this: in the event of the drive on which I have my O/S failing (it's on an SSD, and I just had my other SDD fail on me) would I be able to restore the image to a different, smaller partition on a different disk, provided that the original, uncompressed size of the data on the original partitions is smaller than that of the partition I want to restore it to?

In other words, if my current C drive is on a partition of 80GBs, but the total data occupies only, say, 40GBs of that - the rest being unused, free space, would I be able to restore one of the backup images to a partition of, say 60GBs? Or does the unused space 'count'?

I seem to recall reading that this will work just fine with Acronis (it won't with Win7's native tool), but can't locate the reference to be sure.

Thanks,

Martin