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After you image a system, is there any single remaining 1 or 0 in the entire drive pertaining from the original system? Or is it entirely a new system. What if the new system image is 50GB smaller than the previous? What does it do with the "extra" 50GB? Does it get wiped to all zeroes? Because couldn't you use some sort of drive recovery service on that 50GB?

Meester Moo
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  • HDD or SSD? some of this depends on the imaging software, but if you were to use an identically sized pair of disks, and wiped the freespace on the source disk before imaging, it would probably write the whole disk, but there is some nuance to it (as is always the case with analog to digital conversions) so stating extremes like "and single remaining bit" is going to get you a nuanced answer akin to "yes with an "if" or no with a "but"". – Frank Thomas Mar 01 '22 at 00:32
  • @FrankThomas Ah okay I see, my question is actually pretty broad. I guess I would ask in the case of an HDD? – Meester Moo Mar 01 '22 at 00:37
  • if the image is smaller than the disk, then whether the parts of the disk that extend beyond the image's range get zeroed would be a function of the imaging software. Simply writing the image to the disk would not touch that area, so if it is done, that is a feature of your software. if you do want it zeroed, consider wiping the disk first to address that concern. and keep in mind, there really isn't any information of recognizable significance that can be stored as just a few bits or bytes. if a little gets left around here or there, that isn't really an issue. – Frank Thomas Mar 01 '22 at 03:38
  • Your question is still not specific enough. What are your tools and under which operating system would you run them? – r2d3 Mar 01 '22 at 12:58

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