Best practices for cloning to a smaller drive

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1

I see that some people in the community have had problems cloning to a smaller ssd drive.
I wanted input on the best practices.
Source Drive: 1TB drive with currently 5 partitions:

  1. OS partition with 700GB free out of 916.78GB
  2. 500 MB EFT partition
  3. 595 MB recovery partition
  4. 12.46 GB recovery partition
  5. 1.08 GB recovery partition

Destination drive I have ordered BLUE 3D NAND 500GB

Is the Acronis software smart enough to handle cloning to a smaller drive?
If not, is there something else recommended?
Should I split the OS partition to make the OS smaller than 500GB and is there someway to pick which partitions get cloned?

Should I return the 500gb drive and buy the 1TB drive to save myself pain?

Thanks in advance

2

I think, and this is just my opinion, if you want to save yourself some pain do a clean/custom install of Windows on the new drive, Then just copy your data from the old one. Acronis is smart enough, but are you smart enough to know how to use it? :grinning: Also a clean install will pretty much eliminate any issues that you MIGHT be having and may not be aware of with Windows.

New drive = New Windows install (for me I never clone)