Clone site collection vs web templates provisioning (team site)

Question

What's the drawback of cloning existing team sites?

Fist I created team sites based on web templates, but after a while with tons of changes from the client I'm thinking of just cloning a "team site" template instead. Why I want this is because the client want to do changes of their own and can later just roll out team sites based on a team site (site collection) that are just a clone.

What I do with my script:

• new content db must be created (with spesific name)
• new site collection (with spesific name)
• new title

• change link to "site contents"

• and renaming the permission group on the site collection..

But is there some drawbacks / pitfalls ?

Update

Each team site have their own content database. It's just a blank team site with web parts and some sorting. Some of the library got some custom content types.

Answer 1

You can clone the site collection( i am sure you are going to use Backup & restore Method).

What i see in terms of disadvantage, you have to perform the cleanup on the new site collection as

• Security / permissions
• Event reciever & Workflows in the list
• Alerts on List
• Search, If both sites crawled and having the same content will cause the confusion to end users. two links for one document(1 from old site and 1 from clone site).
• Another Issue with the GUID(List, Library etc), for developer may be cause the issue.

If you attempt to restore a backup of a site collection more than once to the same content database, you may get the following error message: "No content databases are available for restoring this site collection. Create a new content database and then try the restore operation again." This is because the globally-unique identifiers (GUID) for lists are preserved in the backup file and reused during restore, but the content database requires list GUIDs to be unique. Therefore, you cannot restore a site collection twice to the same content database, and must instead use a different content database.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc767420.aspx