Is there a difference between recovering data from the original drive VS a clone of it

Following up from How to create an accurate byte-level copy of an SSD to another drive?, I did a clone of my entire internal 256GB SSD of my Mac 10.14, with 13-15GB free areas. I have .img file now.

Will trying to do data recovery from a clone of a drive affect the chances of recovery VS doing recovery on the drive itself? Do all data recovery software that can attempt to recover data on the original drive also be able to attempt to recover data from .img clone that I have?

No, there's no difference when you have a byte-for-byte identical clone as you have. And yes, data recovery software should work the same for an original drive as for an image-based clone.

In other cases than yours there could be a slight difference - namely when we're dealing with defective hardware. If you have a broken hard drive for example it might be that if you do a naive clone multiple times, you'll end up with different images. That is not good.

In your case, I advised you to use "dd" to create a clone. That works perfectly well with functioning hardware.

If you had broken hardware, I would have advised instead to use "ddrescue". That utility has support for things like reading the same block multiple times in order to get as much correct data as possible from a malfunctioning drive. Also it can do stuff like leave holes in the clone image that corresponds to the non-working parts of the original drive.

Note that because of TRIM a functioning SSD drive could limit your possibilities of recovering data from the clone. However if you use data recovery software you run yourself on your Mac, then the clone and the original will let you recover exactly the same data.

The only difference is if you access the flash ICs on the SSD drive directly to try to recover data that has been TRIM’ed away. However that is not possible from macOS (or Windows or similar), rather you would typically need specialized hardware and software not commonly available. If you are considering sending in your data to a professional recovery service that has these capabilities, you’ll definitely want to stop using the original drive and send that in - and the continue working on your clone drive instead. NOTE: I know of no such recovery service in existence anywhere for your hardware - I think your only bet is Apple at the moment.