[Guest]

About time machine: Imagine a full crash of your boot drive. With a bootable clone you can simply reboot from your backup drive to continue working. With time machine this is not possible without additional hardware. Moreover, and even more serious, time machine does AFAIK not backup everything. E.g. when you re-install software like Adobe PS via time machine you need to register again (in other words certain settings and registration informations are NOT saved by time machine). In contrast, a cloned backup simply runs like the original.