When I upgrade the drive on my laptop, I will clone the old one to the new.
When I install a new OS, I make my usual backups, but migrate data to the new install on an as-needed basis.
I also have my tutorials to help me remember how to install my special programs and such...
What I've run into with cloning, is the entire partition is cloned, not just the data within. Then you have to clone it to a partition of equal size. I've learned to keep my system partitions minimal but it still takes a tremendous amount of time and resources. I've got an image for 10 but 7 gives an error. This is due to the boot partition being larger than it is supposed to be.