To avoid an XY problem, please allow me to directly state the goal: To be able to easily back up a Windows 11 NTFS system partition and have that partition and those backups take up as little space as possible.
That Windows 11 partition is rarely used (Linux is primarily used), but is used once in a while. The partition is currently 200GB with 80GB used. The storage media is a much larger SSD.
My first inclination is to use Clonezilla. Clonezilla can easily backup the Windows and Linux partitions, as well as all the other partitions.
But Clonezilla has a serious drawback: Clonezilla does not support restoring a larger partition to a smaller partition, even if it would fit (IOW, restoring that 200GB partition with 80GB used to a 150GB partition is not supported).
Clonezilla also doesn't directly support restoring a smaller partition to a larger partition, but this can reportedly be worked around with a couple command line parameters (it's supposed to work, but it's a workaround, so there could be risk involved).
This brings us back to the goal: keeping a Windows 11 system partition as small as reasonably possible and having the backups take up as little space as possible. Here is the current plan:
- shrink the Windows 11 partition to as small as Windows 11 will tolerate (and still work fine)
- backup the partition using Clonezilla as needed
- when Windows 11 needs more space (perhaps due to a large Windows Update patch), increase the size of the Windows 11 partition as required
- backup the partition using Clonezilla as needed
Is there a better way to do this?
As part of this plan, to allow the Windows 11 partition to be expanded in the future, will it be best to create an unused partition immediately following it (logically) on the SSD? For HDDs, this would be needed (else the Windows 11 partition would not be expandable), but I'm not sure if this is needed with modern SSDs.