Hi here's my 2 cents about cloning and creating a image! Copied from the internet!!
Imaging makes more sense for backup, because you can put multiple image backups onto one sufficiently large external hard drive. You can only put one clone on a drive. In fact, several backup programs, including my current favorite for imaging and cloning, Macrium Reflect allow you to make small incremental image backups, recording how the contents of the drive change day to day.
There is one advantage to cloning for backups. Should your main drive crash, you can swap in a cloned drive and be back in action almost immediately. With an image, you’d have to buy a new internal drive and restore the backup to it.
But if you really need to be up and running that fast, and you’re willing to dedicate an entire drive for that purpose, you’d be better off putting the two drives together into a RAID 2. That way, the spare drive will be completely up to date.