Image your system with free Macrium

Mine shows at 3.6GB so it matters whether it contains data or not. Think I'll take a normal image, then delete the page file and hiberfile using a boot disk and then take another image. My money is on them not taking up any meaningful space.

Seems to be so - the test I carried out, firstly with the page file in and secondly with it removed, there was a difference of just 164MB in the image files. Windows wasn't booted in between the tests (to prevent it from recreating the page file) so the only difference between the two was the deletion of the page file.

very easy, just mount the image in explorer and look at it with a hex editor or any file lister.

As for the answer given at Macrium, it's very confusing to say the least.

I believe them, but what is the data that is showing up when the file is examined? It seems to have the same 'header' from one backup to the next, so its consistent. All kinds of data that sure looks like swapfile to me.

Is it data from other files on the backup or what? I'd have expected to see blanks if the file was truly empty, but maybe there's something about this I don't quite get.

"When reading sparse files, the file system transparently converts metadata representing empty blocks into "real" blocks filled with zero bytes at runtime. The application is unaware of this conversion."

Still doesnt make sense to me. Not seeing zeros . Sorry. Maybe my system is doing something odd here.