Clone of a Win System Drive - but DO NOT RETAIN deleted old files?

[Marek]

Hello, I have my Windows 10 on 230GB SDD drive and I wanted to get a bigger one. However, the result I would love is this:

• make a perfect copy of my system drive, so when I launch Windows from my new drive, everything will work without issues, as if nothing ever happened (installed software, patches, pathways, registry, everything).
• at the same time, make sure ONLY the relevant files (blocks?) get retained on the new drive, but DO NOT RETAIN remnants of deleted files

From what I gather, even if one were to try to do erasure of sensitive data with many passes, SDDs in particular are built in a way that you can never be sure whether these files aren't somewhere in there, still recoverable. So, I really do not have time and patience for having to reinstall my Windows and entire setup, I want a perfect copy of my Windows file system that will boot perfectly and then I can continue the work as usual, but at the same time I'm a little concerned about the history of irresponsibly stored data on my current drive, and wouldn't want it retained.

Is there a reliable way to do it under Clonezilla? And any steps I can still do on my current drive in use, to make sure some of the files and documents I am yet to delete, don't make it into a cloned drive once I initiate the cloning? I would be grateful for clear/detailed recommendation, since I'm not really experienced with the software

PS: I've read about something like a "file-system" based cloning, which only clones the 'visible' files as they appear under Windows Explorer, however I've also saw it probably wouldn't work for a bootable Windows drive and I would need a different solution here?

[Steven Shiau]

Clonezilla is a block-based deployment tool. It's different from the "file-based" one.
Hence in your case, I suggest you do that from scratch, i.e., install your OS and applications without putting any sensitive data in that machine. Then take an image for that machine as a golden image.

Steven

[trfl]

Clonezilla would probably skip most of the deleted files, since it only copies the blocks that are currently in use. But if one of the deleted files was placed nearby a file that still exists, then it would be copied over, so there is no guarantee.

A bigger concen is metadata stored in windows caches, registry, indexes and such. These may still mention the deleted files, and I am not aware of any imaging software that is able to deal with that. Filesystem-based cloning is also not a good choice in this regard.

So like Steven said, your best bet is to reinstall windows on a blank disk. For this purpose, it is OK to use your current SSD if you first blank it with either "blkdiscard -f /dev/sda" or "cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda". If the blkdiscard command succeeds, then all deleted data has been removed from regular access, but none of these approaches prevent recovery using special hardware.