Q: best way to clone my boot drive?

Carbon Copy Cloner has a very nice interface for selecting subdirectory trees to copy.  Of course if you do not include the operating syste, it will not be a bootable clone.

CCC has a 1 month fully enabled demo mode.  The backed up data is good forever after the demo mode expires.

Personally, I would just make a full 100% clone and then pick and choose what to restore later.  For that

Carbon Copy Cloner

SuperDuper (a full clone is always free; incremental update of a clone, and backup scheduling you pay for)

Disk Utility -> Restore, except you restore the disk with your data to backup to a backup disk

Clone  - Carbon Copy Cloner          (Often recommended as it has more features than some others)

Clone – Data Backup

Clone – Deja Vu

Clone  - SuperDuper

Clone - Synk

Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested

Time Machine Versus Clones and Archives

Commonly Used Backup Methods