In cq we can create live copies by either blueprints by opting "New Site..." or directly trough content nodes by opting for "New Live Copy...".
In both the cases inheritance is maintained and roll-out works too in same ways. So what is the advantage of using one over other.
Any views?
Live Copies
Live copies can be created for just a simple page or a tree of pages and might the page and it's subpages depending on the rollout configuration. A live copy can be linked to a rollout config or will use the system's default one. There is no formal requirement on the source page's structure. A live copy might reference a blueprint, while it can only reference to a single blueprint.
Blueprints
Blueprints target the rollout of complete multilingual website projects and are a tool to control multiple rollout configs and live copies. A blueprint requires a certain structure for the source site: - One root level page - The root's immediate childs define the language branches of the site - each language contains one or more child pages.
Blueprints allow you to control multiple live copies and centrally consistent rollout configs for the blueprint's live copies. A blueprint rollout will push modifications to all it's live copies.
Usage scenarios of blueprints
Inheritance and rollout work the same way. Just because blueprint make use of live copies. But blueprints help you to organize your rollout scenarios for large multilingual sites. Just imagine a corporate website that provides a two or even three digit number of locales which that need to be translated and kept in sync. In such a scenario you will likely end up with a hardly understandable and maintainable number of live copy and rollout configurations. Depending on a blueprint to e.g. standardize the rollout of a new language/market/locale provides you higher degree of governance over your process as the complete process centrally manageable through the blueprint template.
But as long as you do not have such a scenario you might be fine without having the complete blueprint overhead.