Sector-by-Sector - advantages to this?

This option, which I've seen in Clonezilla and Paragon B&R, is not that clear to me, and I seem to remember someone saying it works this way in IFW/IFD? I think I understand that it backs up or clones all sectors of the partition source/target partition, depending on the operation chosen, and it's certainly a lot slower, but I'm wondering how it differs from typical imaging, and are there any advantages to choosing this option at the obvious expense of time rather than just going with typical defaults? Thank you to any one who can clarify this.

[napoleon1815]

Sector-by-sector will image the entire disk, including all free space (so the image is usually the same size as the disk that is being imaged). Typical imaging only images used sectors, and excludes the pagefile, etc. So these images are smaller by their nature. I've never had a need to do a sector-by-sector image. The only two reasons I can think of to use it is:

1. You use Rollback RX (or other rollback software) and want to make sure your image includes all the restore points.
2. Legal reasons...imaging with sector-by-sector will restore the same free space from the original disk and therefore allow someone to search for "deleted" files on the disk that haven't been overwritten yet.

[treehouse786]

it can also be used to backup data on unsupported file systems which is the main reason why i use it.

[Aaron Here]

Originally Posted by napoleon1815

Sector-by-sector will image the entire disk, including all free space (so the image is usually the same size as the disk that is being imaged)...

While I can't add to the reasons/advantages already given, I have to correct napoleon's suggestion that a s-b-s image is usually the same size as that of the source drive.

While there may be exceptions, every disk-imaging program I've used allows for compression of an s-b-s (raw) image. Because I'm a Rollback Rx user I always create raw images and the compression I typically realize is substantial.

Aaron

Okay, so I guess there's no real advantage to imaging that way, at least in my case. Thank you all for the explanations