Reduce Windows VM disk the right way?

[Cecil]

I've read countless threads that all say "you can only increase disk size, no easy way to claw back unused space"
Some people summarized say "backup and restore to smaller disk" but how ?!

My specific situation:
I just "upgraded" my single proxmox node into a 3 node cluster using NFS as the shared storage for VM disks.
I migrated the 10TB disk as-is (took 2 days) but I really want to reduce that down to 2TB at most.

Do I use something like clonezilla and create a new blank 2TB disk, clone the existing 10TB disk( that has less than 2TB data on it) to the new disk and then change boot order, detach the 10TB disk and hope it works?

 

[Cecil]

Sofar after trying multiple options, no luck at all. Clonezilla cannot do a large partition to a smaller one even though 90% of it is empty space.
Windows will not allow me to reduce the disk size, there are locked system files scattered all over the thing.
I tried multiple defraggler runs and also no luck.

I know some partition magic software will do it in a special bootable image that runs on restart before windows starts up and that should do the trick but paying a bunch of money for a one time use of the software is unpleasant.

 

[bbgeek17]

The backup/restore method most likely refers to doing an OS level backup within the VM itself. For example built-in Windows backup or Veaam, or something similar.
You can then create a new VM and restore the OS/data to the disk. There will be no dependencies on disk sizes (depending on backup choice). Essentially it would need to be a file level backup.

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