Sometimes; when working with partimage, someone can create a backup of a 1TB partition which contains -for example- only 10GB of data; in this case, when we want to restore it, partimage will fail if the restore disk does not have enough space (1TB in this case).

I faced this problem and here the trick I used to restore the backup image to a smaller disk image.

Create an image file

Create an image file with the right size (with seek, we don't need to actually have the whole space):

# Make sure that the seek=[SIZE] is sufficient
dd if=/dev/zero of=disk_image.img bs=1 count=1 seek=1TB

Use image file as loopback

Make the image looks like a disk, by making it as a loopback device.

sudo losetup /dev/loop0 disk_image.img

Restore!

Restore the backup image to the loopback device.

sudo partimage restore /dev/loop0 backup.partimage.000

Done!

Done, now you can mount /dev/loop0 or delete the loopback device and mount the `disk_image.img` directly!

sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0 # delete loopback device

mount disk_image.img /mount/point

This was a trick that I want to share!