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[Thesis due, please help quick] Shrink Backup to fit smaller hard drive

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Hi,

my hard drive crashed and I have a backup file that's 480GB big. However, the replacement drive which I have only has 280GB. I mounted the backup and deleted some files in write mode. It created a new incremental but it still thinks it has 480GB although the mounted drive shows more free disk space. Is there any way I can exclude files when recovering?

Thanks!

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Greetings,
Files, or extensions can be excluded during the back up process.

Whe restoring, you are able to restore whole disks, partitions or files only. You cannot selectively chose which files or data to exclude when restoring a full disk or partition image.

Based on the limited information we have, I can't guaruntee you will be able to restore your current image to a smaller disk, but you can certainly try.

This is a helpful guide  << Credit to Grover H

JA,
If you are doing a restore from a full disk image, you can recover files and folders selectively, but you can not exclude files or folders while restoring a full disk image. The method you are suggesting "may" work, but no guarantee there. When you mount a backup image in read/write mode and delete files from within the mounted image and dismount it, you will see the new incremental file, but Acronis will still report the backup size as the size of the original backup. When you restore the disk from the last incremental, the amount of data to be restored "should" be based on the size of your full backup minus the size of the files you have deleted from the mounted image. The issue that may cause you problems will be during the disk restore process. When you select the last incremental that you wish to restore, Acronis may still think that the data size is larger (because of the original backup data/partition size) than the destination disk size and refuse to restore. Only testing will give you a definite answer. When you select your source backup for recovery, be sure to select the last newly created incremental as the source. Please let us know of your results.

To save yourself some pain in the future, consider using more than one partition. Keep the OS on one (C:) and keep data, media files and the like, on the other. That way you can get running again quickly and selectively restore data as you go.

"My Whatever" folders can be redirected to look at a folder on any partition by using the "Location" tab in their properties panels. Or, you can just ignore the "user" folder idea entirely and consider the whole drive structure to be "Your Documents" and put stuff wherever it fits and is easiest to maintain.

Hi all!

Thanks for your replies!

I wasn't successful with modifying a smaller incremental backup which is restorable. That's definitely a feature request from my side. As I really needed to finish my thesis, I bought a larger hard drive and restored the backup.

I'm done with my thesis (yay!)

JA,
Good to hear! I'm sure that's a great weight off of your shoulders.