shadow protect question

I have two separate questions actually
1) i have taken a backup of 20 gb fat32(active ) partition .
if i merge it with another partition to make 40 gb of a c drive after formatting and then convert it to ntfs . will the backup i have taken work here(get restored correctly) also, or will get a error message.

2)do i get some backup software just like the shadowprotect where in i have the options selectively leaving out some folders from restore.(just like exclusion list of rollback rx).
looking for great solutions.......

 

It depends on how you restore.

If you restore the entire image, as a volume, you will be able to restore it to any volume of equal or greater size. After the restore, the restored volume will contain exactly the content of the volume which you backed up in the image file, including its file system (such as a FAT32 file system). There is no need to format a target volume prior to restore as the restore of an image will simply wipe out the existing file system, replacing it with the file system contained in the backup.

If you simply restore individual files from the backup image (by mounting the backup image file and copying files out of the mounted image's virtual drive) then your target file system will remain unchanged.

During image restore, there is no file exclusion. The restore operation is a volume-centric (not file-centric) operation.

 

so i can restore the backup of data to a partition greater or equal to the original one.Wat happens if the size of destination is lesser than original partition space ,but large enough to accommodate data?

 

You may be able to accomplish that restore as well (to the smaller volume) by shrinking the file system in the image (which is a 3.3 feature - 3.3 is shipping in a day or two).