I have been a Winclone user for a number of years, and have always relied on it to create backups of my bootcamp partitions. However, since about version 8, image creation, even with the block-based option turned on, has become extremely slow. I was hoping the situation would improve in version 9, but sadly it has not.
I am running a 2015 Retina iMac with full SSD and 40GB RAM, yet a 150GB image from an external firewire mounted Macbook Pro 2018 I’ve been trying to create has been running for at least 4 hours and is not even at 40% yet. Before, when I used WIM, i left it overnight and only got to 5%. I am not running any anti-malware or anti-virus software, and am on the lastest (until this morning) version of Big Sur. Extremely frustrated to say the least!
Before, with version 5 or 6, the same image would have taken 40 minutes at most on much older and slower hardware