Preparing a partition on which to restore a disk image using gnome disk utility

Question

I have recently created a partition image of an HFS+ partition which contains a time machine backup. I used Ubuntu Disks (gnome-disk-utility) to create the partition image. I am now wanting to restore the partition image to my external HDD. There are no available partitions on the HDD, only free unallocated space.

The disk utility does not allow me to restore the image into unallocated space. So I need to make a new partition before restoring the image. As far as I can see, gnome disks does not allow one to make a new partition without formatting it with a filesystem (ext4, HFS+ etc).

1. Do I need to format the new partition with the same file system as the original backup (HFS+)?

2. If I make the partition bigger, does the restored filesystem have access to the additional space in the partition?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

• An image of a partition should be restored to a partition, and an image of a whole drive should be restored to a whole drive.

• You need not format the partition, because it will be overwritten anyway by the cloning process.

• Yes, exactly the same size or bigger, but not smaller. But it is a waste to make it bigger unless you intend to edit it afterwards (to increase the size of the file system).

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• Edit: In response to the edit of the original question, I add the following.

  • For a 'cloning restore' operation in general, you need not format the partition, that you intend to be the target (where to restore from the image file). This is possible, if you create the target partition with another tool than gnome-disks, for example gparted. But you can also format the partition (it will be overwritten anyway, so the final result should be the same).
  • The restored file-system will have its original size, but it is possible to increase its size afterwards, with a suitable tool.