size requirement of the clone target USB drive?
Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2020 4:55 pmWhen I clone a 80GB hard drive, what size does the target USB drive need to be? Does that depend on how much of the hard drive space is used?
Yes, in general if you clone a disk of size 100GB but with only 20GB of data, the target disk needs only be 20GB (or a little bit more).
This is as long HDClone knows the file system, and knows how to shrink it down to the minimum required size. This is the case with NTFS, FAT and ExFAT, as well as MacOS’s HFS+.
The Linux file systems ext2/3/4, XFS and btrfs are recognized, and HDClone will only copy the used portions, but it doesn’t know (yet) how to rewrite the file system so that only 20GB are required. Currently, it needs to spread the 20GB all over the original size, as all the pointers are left intact.