Restoring a Full Backup to a Smaller Hard Drive

[Jeff.Mincey]

Suppose I use Endpoint to back up 200 GB on a 500 GB hard drive and subsequently I want to restore this 200GB of data to a 250 GB hard drive. Is this possible, or must the capacity of the restore destination be equal to or greater than that of the source?

[Dima P.]

Hello,

200 GB on a 500 GB hard drive and subsequently I want to restore this 200GB of data to a 250 GB hard drive. Is this possible

I most of the cases - yes. However, you may face issues with unmovable data blocks that reside the end of the system volume’s layout and make it “unshrinkable”. In order to be completely sure I’d run any diagnostic before performing such "migration" with tool like Defragler and check the excising block allocation map. Disk cleanup and regular built in defrag could also help.