I would suggest that a cloned install creates a NTFS partition rather than a ext4 casper-rw partition.
This way the space not used by the live install becomes useful as a Data partition with both Linux and Windows.
Perhaps a small tool or script could be created in the NTFS partition that, when activated, would change the Data partition to a persistent partition and add “persistent” to the boot loader. This might be done using an alternate boot partition. Not sure about the details.