That means that sometimes you can't even clone a 1TB disk to another 1TB disk because the target disk might be 2Mb “smaller”?
I can't believe that.
I don't know how exactly Clonezilla clones, but couldn't you reduce the data partition of the 1TB disk so that it is small enough for a 500GB disk or is the unallocated space also cloned?
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Rescuezilla does not yet automatically shrink partitions: currently the image's final partition must always completely reside within the destination disk for the restore to succeed. This means that cloning and restoring an image to a destination disk smaller than the original (when there is sufficient free space) requires a careful workaround that uses the GParted Partition Editor to shrink the final partition on the source disk.
If you are not familiar with GParted Partition Editor, please make sure you have saved an unmodified Rescuezilla backup image to a third drive and be extremely careful.
The currently implemented behavior is exactly how Clonezilla currently works, which is imperfect but can get the job done with the careful workaround (and in Clonezilla's case, an expert mode option).
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Yesterday I cloned a 223GB SSD to a 120GB SSD. First I made a copy to another 223GB SSD and connected this to my system via a USB cable. I used gparted and reduced the partition size OF THE COPY to 100GB. Then I copied/saved an image of this to an external SSD. With Rescuezilla I "restored" this to the 120GB - worked great. Get familiar with gparted. It's very useful. BTW, I'm a Linux Mint (Xia 22.1) user.
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2025-03-17
I had first tried cloning the reduced size SSD using Clonezilla which kept stopping with file size issues, so I used the image saving/copying method. I just tried Rescuezilla and this clones with no error, so the image step isn't needed.
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Hello,
I have a 1TB NVMe here that needs to be cloned to a 500GB NVMe.
Linux is installed on the source NVMe.
Is that possible?
Greetings
boer
You generally need to go from a smaller disk to a larger disk.
Hello & thanks for your answer.
That means that sometimes you can't even clone a 1TB disk to another 1TB disk because the target disk might be 2Mb “smaller”?
I can't believe that.
I don't know how exactly Clonezilla clones, but couldn't you reduce the data partition of the 1TB disk so that it is small enough for a 500GB disk or is the unallocated space also cloned?
Official documentation is here: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/wiki/HOWTO:-Restoring-to-a-smaller-disk.-Eg,-1000GB-HDD-to-500GB-SSD
The currently implemented behavior is exactly how Clonezilla currently works, which is imperfect but can get the job done with the careful workaround (and in Clonezilla's case, an expert mode option).
Hello.
Thank you for the informative answer.
I had already thought that it must work somehow.
Yesterday I cloned a 223GB SSD to a 120GB SSD. First I made a copy to another 223GB SSD and connected this to my system via a USB cable. I used gparted and reduced the partition size OF THE COPY to 100GB. Then I copied/saved an image of this to an external SSD. With Rescuezilla I "restored" this to the 120GB - worked great. Get familiar with gparted. It's very useful. BTW, I'm a Linux Mint (Xia 22.1) user.
I had first tried cloning the reduced size SSD using Clonezilla which kept stopping with file size issues, so I used the image saving/copying method. I just tried Rescuezilla and this clones with no error, so the image step isn't needed.
Thank you both.
That's a very good idea.
Does this also work with encrypted partitions?