Size required ?

I have learned that if you want to restore an image, the new hd has to be at least as big as the source irrespective of how much of the source hd was actually in use. So if you have a hd with 80gb and only one partition, your restored hd has to be at least 80gb again.

My snapshots/ archives are between 3 and 8.5 GB, how much space would I need to rebuild a slimmer system using Fd_ISR. If I started with a clean hd, installed Windows and Fd_ISR and then imported/copied from an archive, how would that play out re space? Could I partition the new hd into 20gb/60gb and install via the archive in the 20gb? Then if I wanted to use images in future, the partitioned drive would be smaller and faster to image and restore. Not sure whether my thinking is correct, so would love to get some expert input.

 

Peter, I have to admit I don't really understand your suggestion probably due to the fact that I am just not familiar with the details of any imaging program.

You are right I was thinking of SP with respect to the initial requirements and I am currently again toying with the idea of using either SP or Paragon, though haven't installed anything yet. But because of the requirements for the imaging programs, I was wondering if I could use Fd_ISR to achieve something similar? Or in other words, if you start a fresh hdd by importing an archive, how much space do you have to calculate for?

 

That shouldn't be true - if you have an image of an 80 gig drive (or partition) of which only 15 gigs was used, and you wanted to restore that image to a new clean hard drive that was also 80 gigs, your imaging program likely would only require the minimum amount of space to restore that image, 15 gigs, in this example. The remaining 65 gigs not required for the image restore would then manifest as unallocated space.Since the used space was only 15 gigs, you could've just as well restored the image to a 50 gig hard drive.

fdisr would require only the amount of space that the archive needs in order to restore, no more and no less.

Sure you could- say if windows was on your 60 gig partition and your fdisr archives were on your 20 gig, and you wanted to restore an archive that needed 5 gigs, that's just 5 gigs less you'll have on your 60 gig- but there'd be no problem restoring an archive like that. The only thing is, it's really preferable if you can, to keep your archives on a true seperate hard drive, whether internal or external- if you keep both windows and archives on the same drive and it goes bad, you've lost your archives, which are more important than your windows installation.

Good luck

 

Hello there,

From my experience with Paragon, Acronis and other imaging solutions (no experience with Shadow Protect, though) I would say that when you restore an image, the size has to be larger than the amount of data.

The size of the restored partition is not determined by the total size of the original partition.

In your case you have 20 GB of data, so it would be possible to restore to a partition of let's say 25 GB. Regardless of the fact that you took the image of a 250 GB disk.

Paragon offers features to resize partitions without loss of data.

Also: imaging of a smaller partition won't be faster, since any imaging solution usually ignores unused space.