Restore image to smaller...best practice

Restore
1

If you have image backups of a larger drive (1tb 7200rpm spinner) & when the drive fails you plan on replacing with a smaller sata (512gb ssd) what is the best practice to do an image restore?

  1. Make a smaller partition (500gb) now, have URBackup do an image, ignoring the unused/unpartitioned drive space, and then restore the image to the new smaller drive (I havent tested if this will even work/boot)
  2. Grab another working drive of same size (1tb). Have URBackup restore to that and then use yet another 3rd party (Acronis/macrium) to then clone to a smaller drive?
  3. What would u recommend/do?

Thanks

2

The newest restore cd (at Releases · uroni/urbackup_restore_cd · GitHub ) can restore to smaller disks. It needs “spill space”, though – a temporary disk where it saves any additional data. In your case e.g. a 500GB usb disk…
Obviously best would be if you did a test restore to check if everything works. E.g. it currently only works with GPT formatted disks.

(1.) should also work.