I don't know what you guys are doing to get a 49GB directory created by Clonezilla, from one partition or disk. How big is that disk/partition originally?
I have to stop using that program, but because it is very slow, does unnecessary operations like rebuild "initramfs" which takes at least 5-10 minutes each kernel it finds, including the ones that should be affected by "sudo apt autoremove" and it becomes married to internal disk so it's probed hundreds of times per run. But I can't find something else better that I could trust. I've been using that program without much desire before I joined this site, but I don't want to use something else if it's also clunky and counterintuitive.
If you are like me, who likes running entire Linux OS's from external pluggable disks, which I don't recommend anyone else to do, Clonezilla could help fix a few things. Especially something I've discovered which I believe is more disgusting than disk fragmentation on Windows. Startup taking very slow. With backing up with Clonezilla, reformatting to zero's, making sure the disk has GPT, and restoring back to that disk has increased performance. But it might be temporary. Now I'm convinced Linux dumps on itself even more than Windows ever did. Definitely from computer turn-on to log-in screen, it's taking way longer than any Windows version I've seen. The absolute winner used to be Windows7. :/
I almost forgot to mention I did this operation recently on my MX Linux "Wildflower" installation. It wasn't long before it's dragging its foot again starting up, with the message "Loading Linux 5.10.0-26" staying a really long time. Whatever has the "deb11.11" or whatever stemming from Spiral Linux "Bullseye" that I have is also holding up like this much longer than anything I ran last year.
Usually from cloning an operating system off a 32GB USB disk, the resulting Clonezilla directory doesn't go much more than 4GiB. I do try to clean out unnecessary business from the installation before backing up. But sometimes I do get lazy which costs me about 1.5 to 2GiB more.
I also boot Clonezilla from a disk prepared with Ventoy. Because it is the only way I could tolerate it.