Restore Time Machine onto smaller SSD drive I have a 2012(?) macmini at home and last night I backed up my HDD to Time Machine then moved the 1TB HDD to the 2nd bay and installed a new 250GB SSD into the 1st bay.
I formatted the new drive to Mac OS Journaled and rebooted.
Now I have tried to restore from Time Machine, but my backup (after excluded folders) is about 375GB.
I have 2 questions:


Is it possible to alter the time machine backup and delete folders I know I have backups elsewhere to get this under 250GB and then restore from that?
If 1 is not possible, how do I reboot to use the original HDD again and redo my Time Machine backup for essential files only?


I've read other questions which say try a clean install, but it would take me days to re-configure my system the way I need it, so that is not an option.

I have a full backup on external HD as well as full cloud backup.
I've ended up answering my own question as follows:


I wasn't able to delete files from the Time Machine backup and got the following message: The operation can't be completed because backup items can't be modified
I rebooted using Command+R and then tried to restore from Time Machine. I kept getting errors saying the new drive was too small. I then installed OSX onto the new drive and then did the restore which worked ok.