I'm evaluating Image for Windows right now and going through the manual to familiarize myself with the software and came across a topic where it talks about the "Compact" option: Compact – Click the Compact button to compact the partition’s file system. FAT/FAT32 and NTFS file systems are supported. This option allows you to reduce the size required for a restore. You will be prompted to confirm the compaction and then asked for the compaction value (size in MiB). For example, if you have a 250GB partition that contains 50GB of data and requires 150GB of space to restore and you need to restore it to a 100GB partition, you can compact the file system to under 100GB before imaging it and then restore it to the 100GB partition. I am having a hard time understanding why 50GB if data will require a 150GB of free space to perform the restore. Can anyone explain this to me? Thank you.
GhostR1der, One topic to remember when restoring or copying from a larger to a smaller partition is sector spread. TeraByte presents this as MiB to Restore. You may have to “Compact” the sectors if MiB to Restore is larger than the target partition. With restores, TeraByte apps do sector based copies/restores so if your original partition was....( * is sectors in use, - is free space) [---**----**--] then the target partition to copy/restore into cannot be smaller than... [------------] You can't restore into a smaller partition like this... [------] But you can compact the sectors to [**-**--------] and then create an image Now you can restore to a smaller partition like this [**-**] Even easier is the "Compact Data" option in Restore Options or Copy Options. This does a "full" compact and your restore would look like this. [****-] Don't use this option if you don't need to use it as the restore/copy time is prolonged compared with a normal restore/copy. For further information see page 218 in the IFW user-guide.
