u/DecisionAnnual

My old iPhone is gone/broken, but I still have a full iTunes backup on my Windows laptop

The backup size is around 252GB, but my new iPhone has about 2GB less free space than required to restore it completely.

Is there any safe way to reduce the backup size, remove unnecessary data from the backup itself, or restore only important things like photos, WhatsApp, contacts, etc.?

I do NOT have access to the old phone anymore, only the backup folder on my PC.

Also, is manually deleting files from the backup folder safe, or will it corrupt the entire backup?