Disk Utility - restore bigger partiton to smaller partition

[petsk]

Does anyone know if it's possible to restore e.g. a 32 GB partition/disk image to a 16 GB partition if the data content is less than 16 GB?

 

[Detrius]

There are ways. When you do the restore, tell it not to erase the destination. I'm not sitting in front of Lion at the moment, so I don't know if they've removed that option. If they have, Carbon Copy Cloner also makes it easy. If permissions matter (e.g. it's a boot drive), make sure to enable permissions on both the source and destination before doing either of these.

If you're going to be doing something like this regularly and from disk images, there are proper ways to make the disk image.

 

[petsk]

There are ways. When you do the restore, tell it not to erase the destination.

At least in Lion there's only two options when you click restore: Cancel or Erase. Doesn't seem to be possible to use restore without erasing the partition.