# Restoring a backup image onto a smaller drive



## MeStinkBAD (Jul 16, 2003)

Well, i managed to make the drive I was working on unusable with mfstools. I found a backup image but trying to restore it tells me the destionation target is to small. Now I've noticed that you can resize the image to fill the entire disk/drives? What about shrinking them to fit? How do I get the image back onto the drive?


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

You can only go back to the original size of the TiVo that the image was made from.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

You can do this by creating a minimal image. I don't know the exact process but I believe its just a matter of changing a couple of parameters when using MFS Tools and the mfsbackup command.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

Minimal backup is done with the -s (for shrink) parameter. For example:

mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /dev/hda1/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

The parameters in the above command:

-f 9999 = Causes the backup to include all videos with ID of 9999 or less. This prevents the backup from "shrinking" out the background videos. The default value for -f is 2000, which used to be enough, but some series 2 TiVos have background videos with higher IDs.

-6 = Compression setting of 6. This controls how aggressive the compression of the backup is. If excluded, no compression will be done. Valid values are 1 to 9 (higher numbers slow the backup).

-s = Shrink the backup to its minimum size. This will divorce two drive setups, and require only as much diskspace as the original image consumed (e.g. 40GB for a 40 hour basic unit).

-o <filename> = The output location. Usually a file on a DOS partition. Can also be "-" which means termout (used when piping the backup directly to the restore).

If you want to backup ALL videos (i.e. save all your recordings) then replace the -s and -f parameters with -a (for "all").


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## MeStinkBAD (Jul 16, 2003)

Well I've been able to restore the image on to a Virtual Drive (I'm using Virtual PC) so should I just use mfsbackup on that with the specified parameters?


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