And if the reason the clone operation failed is because the source disk had a failure in the middle of the clone, then you're left with no source disk and no usable destination disk. And second, if the clone operation ever fails partway through, then your destination is left in an unusable, whereas a failed image backup would still leave you with your pre-existing backups. First, you can only store a single "state" on that clone target, rather than multiple backups from multiple points in time. But there are some downsides to using periodic clones as a "backup".
![clone disk vs image disk clone disk vs image disk](https://www.drive-image.com/Disk_Image_Backup_Articles/Disk_Cloning_and_Mass_System_Deployment/Disk_Cloning_and_Mass_system_deployment_01.png)
By comparison, if you were cloning to your target and your source disk fails, then you can immediately start using that clone target as your replacement disk. If you're only capturing image backups to a target, then if your source disk fails, you have to get a replacement disk first, and then restore the image onto the new disk.
![clone disk vs image disk clone disk vs image disk](https://www.msp360.com/resources/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/image-backup.png)
One of them might be faster depending on the read speed of the clone/image source (assuming that was even the bottleneck), but clones are useful in some cases:
![clone disk vs image disk clone disk vs image disk](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/20/65/0920654e2658ced326d8a0615ff0a358.jpg)
If you already have an image that matches the current state of your source disk, then an image restore and a clone would get you the same end result.