The reason it wouldn't work is because when you copy/paste, you're using the filesystem itself, which has no record of those files ever being there. You wouldn't be able to restore them from the new drive.
They would still be on the old drive, but the filesystem just doesn't know about them anymore. If you wanted to get them back, you would have to go through and do a sector by sector scan... and if you wanted to copy something that wasn't in the filesystem, you would have to do a sector by sector copy... which would actually take up more space. This is because the sector copy would be all the sectors, even those which files aren't currently stored in... that are on the drive. Including the free sectors available to write to. So if you had 10gB on a 20gB drive, and deleted 5gB, a sector copy, which would be able to do what you're suggesting, would still be 20gB, even though there isn't that much usable information.
This was harder to explain than I thought it would be... I hope I didn't lose you.
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