A fresh install, IMO, is better than reinstating a clone. Whatever causes a disaster (they are not always due to mechanical failure) may well be present in the clone.

It's nature's way of telling you to freshen your system.

I agree. I just backup the data files. System is fresh installed on recovery.

Clones are useful for moving to a new hard disk or installing a customized setup on many computers. That's about it.

I run clones of my VMs but that’s as far as it goes.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I run clones of my VMs but that’s as far as it goes.

I like the QNAP backup solution for Windows 10 and 11 devices, Hyper Data Protector application running on the NAS and NetBak PC agent running on the client. After the first backup it does differential backups that you can do via certain events or schedule/on demand. Stored using their deduplicating QDFF file type that is even more efficient when using it to backup multiple devices and you restore via a created boot disk that runs on WinPE

Just ordered a 2 bay USB dock with disk copy feature so I can copy backups between disks without spending 2 hours creating a new base backup.