Restoring ShadowProtect Image To Smaller Disk

ShadowProtect can restore images from a large disk to a smaller disk, but there are a few things you have to know and it won’t work in some circumstances.

Firstly, it is best practice to defrag the drive you want to restore from prior to backing it up. This is so there won’t be so much white space in the backup image.

Secondly, when restoring you may have to mount the image in the recovery environment (not in read only mode), then dismount it and tell ShadowProtect to save changes as an incremental file and shrink the volume. You will then be able to restore the incremental image to a smaller disk.

Thirdly, sometimes it just won’t be possible to restore a large disks contents to a smaller disk using ShadowProtect because there’s just too much white space saved. I don’t know why this is the case, when the actual data stored is less than the size of the disk 🙁

Lastly, if you don’t need to boot from the disk, you could try mounting the image and copying the files across, instead of doing a “restore”.

If you find any other tips to help other readers restore ShadowProtect images to smaller disks, please share them here.