Can I upgrade my pS3 HDD to a smaller size and still restore a backup?

Is the image created for the PS3 backup locked at a certain minimum HDD size or can I go from say a 120GB backup to restoring it on a 64GB HDD?

In terms of backing up/restoring windows HDD images, the image often needs to be adjusted to fit the HDD size but it's also backed up differently.

The amount of data in the backup is around 20-30GB tops so it technically would fit just fine but would the backup be restorable with a smaller HDD size?

2 Answers

The image for the backup is not locked to HDD size. You could move it to a smaller HDD and use that instead. My feeling tho is you may need to install the smaller HDD first so the system formats it, then transfer the backup, then recover it. If you put the backup on the smaller drive, then install it, then the PS3 formats the drive you will be out a backup.

I'm 95% sure you can; my old PS3 was on a 500 GB drive with ~200GB of data, and I restored it onto a 320GB stock PS3 Slim model. I kept the old 500GB for a while in hopes of recovering the data but later gave up. So I'm pretty sure you can restore on any HDD.