Thanks for your detailed explanations. My app allows to sync directory pairs and can be considered a backup app, since one of the two directories can be the backup (on an external volume). Wouldn't this qualify it for that entitlement?
The reason why I'm considering cloning the source directory is that I would like to add an option to calculate the checksum for each source file so that the app can check at certain points in time if the backup files are corrupt. This would be problematic if between copying the source file to the backup volume and calculating the checksum of the source file, the source file is changed (either by the user, or by other apps, such as Photos, which regularly updates its database). The app would make a bad impression if the copied files would immediately be flagged as corrupt because the checksum was calculated on a different version of the source file.
From what I understand I should avoid cloning an arbitrary, user-selected directory, and the only efficient solution I see is to create a source volume snapshot. The other, much less efficient solution that comes to my mind would be to check that the checksum of the backup file corresponds to the checksum of the source file calculated before the copy operation, and if it doesn't, copy the file again until it does.