I have just received the latest version of Shadow Protect IT Edition 3.3, on the the Help -> About screen the full version is listed as 3.3.0.5.

According to another thread in this forum the ability to restore to a smaller partition will be included in 3.3, can anyone confirm if this feature made the cut? 

I tried to restore a backup to a smaller partition, but kept getting the usual message "The selected free space is not large enough for the backup image. Select other free space or create more free space to restore the backup image".

Now the actual amount of data in the C: partition that i backed up was only about 5GB, the partition size was 66.55GB. I wanted to restore to a smaller partition of 20GB, but was not able to.  What i really wanted to achieve was to "re-partition" the disk so i could create another partition, i know i can do this with partitioning software which i will end up doing anyway, i was merely testing out this featue to see if it would work.

A few more things to note, when i initially made the backup of C: there were 2 other partitions (HP recovery) on the same hard disk.

I've tried  this process from both recovery environments 2003 and Vista but still have the same problem.

Can anyone shed some light on this issue?

 Hi Jared

    It does work as I tested it.  If I remember right, you have to tick a box when you do the image and it only works in the Recommended environment.  I just can't remember exactly where that box was.   Reason I remember this much is I can't use the recommended environment due to nvidia driver issues.(Restore doesn't work)

   But I was able to make an image in recommended and restore it to a smaller partition in legacy.

    I don't have time tonight, but if you haven't figured it out by tomorrow morning, I'll boot the disk and take another look.

 Pete

Well I missed by a country mile.   In it's brief form:

1) Image the system.

2) In the Vista environment, Mount the image as a writeable drive.

3) Dismount it saving the incremental.  In the dismount wizard tick the shrink volume box.

4) Then when you restore to the smaller drive, restore the incremental.

 Note, I believe it has to be an NTFS volume.

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the follow up. I've tested your solution and voila...it works.

 Its not really obvious how to "restore to a smaller partition" from the Shadow Protect GUI.

 I'm sure others will benefit from your advice.

Just tested this as well.

Floowoed your instructions using a server edition image and it worked fine.

quick question though.

if the original machine had a 260gb c drive, with 58gb used , using this method, could I restore to a  60gb disk?

is the  incremental the same size as the used on the original?

jeff 

Unfornately, the shrink command we are using is from Vista and it will only shrink down to the last used sector of the volume.  In cases with so much free space, the last free sector is usually the MFT.  The MFT is always put in the middle of the volume.

The work around for this is to defrag the volume after the shrink.  So you must mount it again as read/write, run a defragger that will move the MFT to the center of the disk and then shrink again.  Not elegant, but it works.

We will continue to see how to improve this to make it easier. 

Scott
STC

 Check http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/ and use option -a 5 to force everything together at beginning of disk. It is the best defragmenter I know and best of all... it's freeware. The next version will possibly be able to use Vista's built-in MFT defrag+movement capabilities.

The sources are even LGPL which means you could create a DLL out of the sources, use it with proprietary SP and be fully legit still. You could maybe try ring the guy up and ask if maybe he could imagine relicensing it to you under non-GPL conditions. We done that couple of times and it worked out nicely for both parties.

bsdice:

 Check http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/ and use option -a 5 to force everything together at beginning of disk. It is the best defragmenter I know and best of all... it's freeware. The next version will possibly be able to use Vista's built-in MFT defrag+movement capabilities.

Hey, that's good to know. How do you find all this stuff? And this will move the Vista MFT sectors ok? I'm going to download JKdefrag and try it out. The only product I could get to handle the MFT sectors correctly was Auslogics Disk Defrag. You can download the basic defrag tool free. It worked really well on a Vista install. No problems or hiccups.

I read the kessel.com site and he says he just uses a standard Microsoft API and "move this file to that location" commands to the API. He makes it all sound really easy......which makes me wonder why Partition Magic and the Microsoft Vista partition resize option can't do the same. (The Vista disk manager and Diskpart will not reduce the size MFT zone). Maybe this Kessel guy is just very modest.

Nate, or, A.N.Other

If you reduce the MFT zone below the minimum (12% or whatever) are there any side effects? (Presumably these disk-defrag tools don't make the MFT too small? And presumably the filesystem can automatically expand the MFT zone if it gets full).

Note to self:    [since I couldn't find it anywhere else, and more than once, I've skimmed over the above instructions and missed the point]

"2) In the Vista environment, Mount the image as a writeable drive."

this really means that one needs to boot from the IT CD, map a drive to the network images share, and then muck about mounting, dismounting and ticking the shrink box. Whilst IT ShadowProtectPE will autorun hot within an booted OS (on our case WinXP/2003) the shrink options are not available ('cos it's not Vista).

follow-on thought:  

could the shrink operations have been done within Server 2008 ?  (i.e. if the image server was 2008 and IT ShadowProtectPE runs hot via autorun)

Both Microsoft Vista and Server 2008 have similar, updated Disk Managers. Both allow a user to shrink a partition. This is essentially the same technology used in the WinPE enviroment of the SP Recovery Environment CD.

If you had either Vista, or Server 2008, you would have the option to shrink the partition before making a backup. You could do this without the help of SP.

The only problem with the Microsoft 'shrink' option is that it cannot shrink the partition beyond the zone used for the Master File Table (MFT). This effectively limits the maximum amount you can reduce a partition using this tool.