How to restore to original machine or different? Partition/disk size problems.

[ju1]

Hello, first time user of Clonezilla live and no knowlege of Linux and never used or seen Ubuntu. I have made a partition to partition "image" of C: (68GB of data, HD size 80GB) of laptop to USB HD (blank 300GB). I backed up my computer using ghost also. So now i feel safe and wanted to see how restore of Clonezilla image I made would work. Using Clonzilla instructions from web sites, I go through the steps but get stuck at "the taget is smaller than source" and copy cannot proceed.

I am wondering why that should be the case. One drive will always be different size than other. If the C: on laptop were smaller larger than USB then it would not "image" and now it does not image. The recovery partition is 12.73GB and I had created a partition to copy to which happened to be 12.72. If the original backup (image saving) location has to be bigger than the source, it will always be misfit for the reverse (restore). Then what is the point of saving data using Clonezilla. Am I missing something? How does one restore the Clonezilla "disk image" or "partition image" back to original location in case of disaster or to a new HD or new machine?

Thank you very much.

[Knight]

Does this 80GB HD happen to be a SSD?

Edit: Added the following:
The size of the drive with the images saved on it, (in your case your 300GB external USB drive) does not matter what size it is. I use a SSH for my "image repository", and it's over 12TB, without any problems regarding size differences as far as CloneZilla is concerned.

Also, what type partition format is on the 80GB HDD? I'm assuming NTFS.

Knight.