Is a disk image of the whole hard drive a good way of backing up your files?

I have to make a backup of my macbook pro because its being taken to the technician.
I wanted to know if creating a disk image of the whole internal hard drive to an external one using disk utility is a good and secure way?
After this I would erase my hard drive using this thread : OS X Mavericks: Erase and reinstall OS X
Is this a good procedure? I not which one would be the best one? I read something about bootable clones but I don't seem to fully understand it and I don't know if its what im looking for.
Your help would be awesome!
Thanks!

Disk Utility>Restore will copy the OSX, the Recovery Partition and ALL user data.  It will be an identical copy of the internal HDD.
Third party software such as Carbon Copy Cloner can also perform that same function, but also allow for incremental changes.
Ciao.

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