Etcher Pro Cloning to Slightly Smaller SD Card

We recently received an Etcher Pro and it seems to work nicely in general - thank you for making a nice product!

I did want to ask about one functionality, which I thought would be implemented but does not seem to be. As you know, it’s common when buying different SD cards from different vendors that cards with the same nominal capacity in fact have slightly varying capacities. When using the Etcher Pro (software 1.14.3), we’ve found that it will refuse to clone from, say, a 32GB card to a 31.9GB card.

While this of course makes sense at a basic level, the Etcher Pro is capable of trimming unused space from ext4 partitions, which accelerates the cloning process and is a great feature. Is there any reason that it couldn’t use this functionality to allow it to clone to a slightly smaller card, as long as the trimmed image fits on the smaller card?

In our case, we had a 32GB card that had several ext4 partitions and was using approximately 1.5GB of storage, and we were really hoping that the Etcher Pro could just copy it to another card from a new vendor. We know about PiShrink, etc., but it’s a pain to do that manually and we were really hoping that the Etcher Pro would just handle it.

So, my question is, is there any reason the Etcher Pro couldn’t do what we want using the existing trimming feature, by just tweaking the target selection logic? Or maybe I’m missing something or misunderstanding how the trimming works?

Thank you!
-Jack

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback and inquiry! I’ll ask internally and we’ll get back to you.

Regards,
Christina

Hi,

Unfortunately at the moment, Etcher, which is the open source application EtcherPro is using doesn’t support this. Trimming is only used when ‘flashing from file’ on particular image types. It would be a nice to be able to clone only the used space which would solve the problem you are mentioning while also be faster, but right now we don’t have any immediate plans of releasing such a feature.

Thanks,
Konstantinos

OK - that’s too bad, but thank you for explaining the situation!