Extract from Craig Ball’s article “Preserving Android Evidence: Return of the Clones?”
When computer forensics was in its infancy, examiners collected evidence from disks by copying their contents byte-for-byte to matching, sterilized disks, creating archival and working copies called “clones.” Cloning drives was inefficient, expensive and error prone compared to the imaging processes that replaced it. Yet, disk cloning worked for years, and countless cases were made on forensic evidence preserved by cloning and examined on cloned drives.
