I assume you should apply all the updates thru current before the image is created. I wonder how long that would take ?
You would want to use a good, complete install with all your applications including updates and antivirus, etc. installed, but if you restore several months from now you’re still going to have to check for updates and install them.
Using the recovery partition is a lot faster than installing from scratch. Either way you are going to have to add recent updates.
the main point is that you would do as many updates as possible for the backup- so that if you ever have to restore to it you won’t have to do those particular updates over again- so you’ll be ahead of the game- saving hours of work- you’ll still need to get recent updates- but at least you won’t have to start from scratch- lots of updates will be already backed up and ready to restore