Data recovery on cloned hard-drive?

[HZBrowser]

Saw this post from StackOverflow so I was a bit curious:

http://superuser.com/questions/461753/data-recovery-on-ghost-imaged-hard-drive

Anyways, when we clone the hard-drive from one drive to another, does it do a bit-by-bit clone? In any case, would the data deleted from the original hard-drive be recoverable from the new hard-drive?

 

[price_th]

If I follow correctly, your question is does blank space get copied? Having used Ghost and Snapshot, the answer is no by default. If there is that option, I have not seen it.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Most cloning software has a bit-bit cloning available as an option, but since it takes up more disk space, this option is usually off by deafault. If it is a bit-bit copy, I'd expect you could recover deleted files on the clone, after all it's an exact copy of the original drive.

 

[AdamMY]

Yeah! As recoverdata writes, as long as you have not rewritten the original data with any new file, you do have big chances to recover all your data back. At first you could try a free drive recovery tool: http://blog4mark.blogspot.com/2012/12/deleted-files-recovery.html
It is designed to cope with different data recovery problems. You could give it a shot.
If you are suspicious, you could visit here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/278914-32-recover-drive-format
I found it there.

 

[sharonmiller2]

No, the clone does not clone the free space.

 

[Isidore55]

You'd better take chances with the original drive.