Man, I really, really wish the writers had the foresight and carefulness in their writing to come up with some acceptable phlebotinum justifying why transporter clones and other various transporter transformations not just don't, but indeed can't happen.
I get that it makes for some plotlines, but it also makes for so much idiotic fridge logic. Like "why don't they save a pattern buffer copy of EVERY away team in case of emergency" or "why isn't the federation using a volunteer clone army for military engagements" or indeed what we here.
Or even "why isn't federation surgery just loading someone into the transporter buffer then editing their XML to fix the injury".
And don't even get me started by the wasted potential of holography, especially during and post-Voyager.
Or at least DISCO had used its 31st century setting to explore sci-fi concepts around any of these ideas. Like full on Iain M Banks The Culture, restoring people from their most recent mind state back up.
...until you realize that even the Jem'Hadar won't do it. They had transporters, right? I could maybe buy that the Romulans, Cardassians, and Klingons would refuse to do it based on some combination of pride and honor, maybe. I could never buy that an organization like Section 31 wouldn't, though, or any number of the monster-of-the-week species.
It's already established that transporters can edit someone's DNA, so that would be a way to prevent aging and treating genetic diseases. If you have a way to duplicate the buffers then you could make a backup for cases when someone dies from an accident at the cost of a few hours of memories.
It was always my understanding, that people are stored digitally in the transporter buffer, so of course they could be stored there for extended periods of time.
That's also why I was surprised when people argued that you cant copy people with the teleporter. For me it always was a remote replicator