- Acquisition or imaging is the first step of the forensic process and involves making a sector-by-sector duplicate of the original drive or device to preserve the data. This duplication includes hashing to verify the copy is intact. - Disk imaging copies every sector of the disk including file metadata, directory structure, and formats all information into binary 0s and 1s. - A write blocker is used to prevent modification of the original drive during duplication to avoid altering or contaminating the data. Clusters are the basic unit of storage on a hard drive, made up of sectors, and determine the smallest file size that can be stored.