Special note: My experience with Recovery Partitions are with Hewlett Packards and eMachines
I have restored many times from a factory Recovery Partition and never once touched the data partition. Recovery Partition's restore the partition they were designed to write too. That partition can be smaller or larger. If that partition does not exist one will be created using all available space.
While using third party cloning tools, restoring a disk image will only write to the partition you tell it too. In fact you can backup one partition and then restore the same image to another partition. I've done this several times, while setting up dual and triple Boot Menu's.