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Are there options to restrict search space (i.e. limit data sources that could potentially contaminate an investigation)?

And if so, is that a common practice, or is it more typical to search through all avaliable data for anything potentially useful and weed out later?

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I don't specifically remember an option to weed out searching, but I'm reasonably certain there were advanced options that included "does not equal" or "does not contain" type boolean searching. From my experience though, it wasn't common practice to weed out from the start, but rather to start with a general search and slowly narrow it down to the targeted data. A lot of data sources weren't automatically imported, they were more like extended queries. So if I wanted employment records, for example, I had to initiate that as a custom search to query that external system, and pull back the data for the specific individual I was investigating, it was not available in the database by default. But once it was imported and tagged, it was available in any future searches for the remainder of the data retention period.

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