You can manually create a snapshot of a BE for reference. This snapshot is a read-only image of a dataset or boot environment at a given point in time. You can create a custom name for the snapshot that indicates when the snapshot was created or what it contains. You can then copy that snapshot.
Note that a clone is a complete bootable copy of an image that can be much larger than a mere snapshot. The snapshot merely records what's changed in the datasets instead of copying all the datasets contents.