Question about saveing to a USB

I have a general question about what happens when I save a document or a photo to my USB . If I select a document or photo from a web site on my laptop and use "save as" and save it to my USB does the photo or document go to or through my laptop hard drive or does it go directly to the USB? If so does any of it remain on my hard drive and can any of it be recovered? Thanks

 

Greetings, giii98.

Virtually every file you see on a website is stored, at least temporarily, on your hard drive. It will stay there until whatever cache it is using is flushed, either automatically by the OS or manually by you or some cleaning program.

Recovery of these files is problematic - they're temporary files. For instance: when Internet Explorer's browsing cache gets full, it starts dumping older files (the FIFO law - First In, First Out). If you access the cache before this process affects any files in question, then there are ways to see and save them. If you wait too long, however, there's nothing for most forensics software to find.