Do you have an SD card slot on your host PC? If so, then there is no need to use recovery mode for clone. You could simply use dd on that partition.
As an example, if on your PC it turns out the SD card shows up as “/dev/mmcblk1” (I’m just making that up…monitor “dmesg --follow” as you connect the card and see what it is really called), then this would create a clone of the rootfs (the part which needs backup):
sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk1p1 of=clone.bin bs=1M
Note the “p1”. This is the first partition, which is where the “APP” label is, and “APP” is rootfs. This will also be the only ext4 partition. If for some reason the SD used a name like “/dev/sdb”, then the same partition would be “/dev/sdb1”. Adjust for your case.