For home use, there is no real difference between a clone and an image. At the enterprise level thay use snapshots which are done many times per hour and are updated as data changes.
Macrium will do incrementals but that feature comes with the paid version. But with the size of today's external USB drives, why use incrementals? Just keep two images and delete the oldest after taking a new one.
The free version allows accessing the image at the file level for restores. At least, it says so but I've never tried it.
I saved a friend of mine a HUGE headache when the drive on her laptop she uses for business died recently. I set up the laptop for her and despite my warnings, she never used Macrium or took backups/images.
Fortunately, I did an image before I gave the unit back to her the first time. Her drive dies and she brings it to me asking if it can be fixed....I say 'no' after a quick exam. I get a new, bigger drive, install it, boot from Macrium Emergency CD and reimage the new drive with a backup I did 6 months ago. She's back in business...though there was some personal data loss...but that was her fault for not keeping up. Without Macrium, she was screwed...catalogs gone, contact gone. Scared her good.
My home PC was infected with a virus nasty last month. I wiped the drive, booted to CD and restored an image from the previous week. No more virus. Then restore personal data backups from the previous day using Cobian. Easy Peasy.
Thanks for the help! I am getting a couple hard drives and cancelling my two Carbonite subscriptions ASAP!