[Darryl Ramm]

One of the whole points of cloning a drive is to get a bootable clone... that you can then test by booting off, testing is all important here. And this can make recovery as simple as just booting off that clone (but that may need a fast SSD external drive to give you the similar performance as the internal SSD).

This is impossible without creating partitions, and your Mac has multiple hidden partitions, you likely want all those cloned as well... to partitions on the clone drive. So do it right and get new external drives to clone to, at least two.