My netbook is a Windows7-Ubuntu 12.04 dual boot. in gparted the strcture looks like Partition filesystem size /dev/sda2 extended 152.86GiB __/dev/sda6 ext4 149.04GiB __/dev/sda5 linux-swap 3.81GiB /dev/sda3 ntfs 100MiB /dev/sda4 ntfs 145.13GiB /dev/sdb1 fat32 149.05GiB I want to backup my ubuntu 12.04 installation that is sda2 (sda6 + sda5) to sdb1. As you can see sda5 +sda6 is 152.86 GB where are sdb1 is only 149.05 GB. Can I backup only sda6(149.04GB) without losing any data? That is to say, will I be able to restore my ubuntu using only sda6 and later add the needed swap? Edit: Made it readable.