[dnanian]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Cloning" vs. "Image", but I'm going to assume that you mean writing to a disk image vs. writing directly to the drive.

In general if you can possibly write directly to the drive, we strongly suggest you do that. It's faster, has less "indirection" involved, and works well. Plus, it's usually bootable.

Images can be helpful when you need to restore to a lot of computers (like in a lab environment), and if you need to store files either across a network or side-by-side on a drive that you don't want to partition.

Does that answer your question?