Restore to smaller harddrive

Discussion in 'Paragon Drive Backup Product Line' started by NegativeZero, May 18, 2011.

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  1. cognus

    cognus Registered Member

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    I have an outstanding support ticket on this issue but I think I'm having language problems with the person on the other end - getting nowhere at all.
    That person completely ignores my questions about so-called "Shrink Restore", instead saying I must carve up the data into smaller pieces and restore a bit at a time. in my past experience with B&R versions, what is being suggested would work if one ONLY wanted to add things to an already-boot-ready drive. I do not see a way to make a fresh drive bootable absent imaging the entire drive.
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see no options discussed that would allow one to select something like "backup ONLY the OS and boot track files" in order to simply make a booting running image, into which then one could restore a few playthings. ... I think he/she is simply not reading my original post, nor subsequent attempts to clarify.

    what you're suggesting sounds doable but I would still like to hear somebody defend "shrink restore". I never succeeded in getting anything at all restored to a new/fresh SSD... even wrong! :D in all cases I either got the error "this image cannot be restored to the target" ... something like that, or it would not give a message, but when "applied" would write garbage to the drive, destroying the partition in the process and leaving a zombie partition unformatted... something like that which had to be wiped out in all cases.
    I never previously encountered anything like this in working with conventional platter drives.

    its as though the software development process was botched... the marketeers succeeded in touting something dubbed "shrink restore", which never actually survived Dev.... is nowhere described in detail; neither in the manual nor in the package. The person responding to my inquiry doesn't even acknowledge the question, just skips it and continues to repeat the same answer "you must backup and restore PART of the drive..."
     
  2. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    The Paragon overview for B&R11 describes shrink restore with this entry:

    Restore with Shrink to restore a backup image to a free block of smaller size taking into account only the amount of actual data of the image​

    This description doesn't imply anything magic to me other than to say you are able to restore a larger partition to a smaller amount of space as long as the actual used data will fit in it.

    My observations are all based on booting up the Paragon Recovery CD/USB key.

    It appears that the restoration has to be done at the individual partition level rather than the whole disk level so the partitions can be resized and this isn't surprising. I did this and listed how I did it in one of my earlier posts. You do have to ensure you select the partition not the whole disk in the what to restore windows. Sometimes the windows look like they are for information but a selection can be made for highlighting which item you want - I wish they always put in a tick box but Paragon isn't the only program to do this.

    I rechecked my steps when I did my previous post of how you can restore XP to a SSD and have it aligned by setting up the partitions first and confirmed if the whole disk is selected you won't get any resize option presented in the next screen.

    The program is relying on the user to specify how much of the free space he wants to be allocated to the recovery of the partittion although there is a lower limit specified based on the actual data size.

    It does work - at least with spinning drives and it should with SSD drives as well.
     
  3. cognus

    cognus Registered Member

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    in my case the actual data size of the archive is/was only 19gb, and I tried it both ways: unformatted [failed], and formatted via my win7 desktop, one big partition [other than the 100mb]. "cannot restore the archive to this partition".... I tried it both with archive saved directly to usb drive [platter] and to hard drive, copied over to usb device. spent way too much time fighting it... This is a different experience for me, as I always had quick success with paragon in the past, and recommend it to everyone.
     
  4. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    I'm at a loss but are you sure you are selecting the correct partitions in the process - that's what the error sounds like. Do you have meaningful labels on the partitions both in the backup and on the target drive if it has been parttitioned. You cannot rely on drive letter assignments in Linux because it uses a different assignment system than Windows but it all works out when Windows starts up.

    Perhaps we should try a baby-step! If you have the SSD formatted can you do a File Transfer using the Paragon File Transfer wizard? Any file will do for a test. If this fails then maybe there is a problem with the Linux recovery environment seeing the SSD properly.
     
  5. cognus

    cognus Registered Member

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    yep, in fact I deliberately chose the wrong one after failing the right one.
    the stranger behaviour to me was a couple of times, instead of the error message "cannot restore..." instead I got a 'Go', but when it ran, it did not restore, and again at the end, left no error message. except for the fact it was over in a split second one might have been fooled..... it left something on the hd, but neither a partition nor readable data. o_O

    that's a good root-cause suggestion. I'll give that a try on sat.
     
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