rogfanther wrote:
I would still use Clonezilla, it has worked ok for me in easily restoring notebooks used for field technicians.
What I would not be so sure is the size of the final file. If you have another 1tb drive, just to make sure the created file will not overflow the 500GB drive, it would better. Otherwise, you can just try and see if Clonezilla will complain about no space left on device.
But with everything considered, clonezilla DOES skip the "empty" parts of the disk, right? Else it would be rather pointless?