Is it any different to clone each partition separately VS cloning the entire disk, when clone is meant for data recovery?
Partitions are fixed in size, so taking images of each partition individually does the same thing as taking an image of the whole disk. The only small difference is that any gaps between partitions (if they exist) are only included in the full disk image. But this gaps are „invisible“ anyway, so for any user-level data duplication and recovery operations this doesn’t make a difference.