A clone’s link to its original is its main characteristic feature; that is, after all, why we use clones. This link facilitates a lot of tasks in complex designs—for example, you can use clones for identical buttons or bullets on a website mockup, with the ability to change all such elements at once by changing their common original. However, sometimes this link becomes an obstacle, and you want to edit your object independently of its former original. For this, you need to unlink the clone.
Select a clone and press 
(or select Edit ▸ Clone ▸ Unlink Clone). Visibly, nothing changes; but the clone ceases to be clone and becomes a regular object—a full copy of the original, with all its additional transforms and style preserved, now totally independent and independently editable. You can unlink many clones at once.
What happens if you delete the original of a clone? By default, its clones are automatically unlinked—that is, they are turned into full copies of the object being killed. On the same Clones tab of the Inkscape Preferences dialog you can, however, choose a different behavior and force all clones to commit mass suicide when their original goes under:
When you relink a clone, it remains a clone, but its original changes. Manual relinking is done as follows: Suppose you have a clone C of an object A, but want it to be a clone of B instead. Select B and copy it to the clipboard (
), then select the clone C and do Edit ▸ Clone ▸ Relink to Copied. After that, C becomes a clone of B—which, depending on what is B, may result in C changing shape, style, position, transform, or any combination of these (Figure 16-9).
Manual relinking is a rarely needed operation. More useful is automatic relinking on duplication. Imagine that you have a complex group of objects, some of which are clones of others—for example, a 3D-like graphic button where the shadow is a blurred clone of the main shape. Now, you select this entire group and duplicate it. What happens?
Within the group, each regular object will duplicate to a regular object, and each clone will duplicate to a clone. However, the clones will still be linked to the originals in the source group—which is most likely not what you wanted! It would be more natural for the shadow in the duplicated group to be a clone of the shape in the same group, instead of some other group far away. To ensure this, go to the same Clones tab and check When duplicating original+clones: Relink duplicated clones. Now, after duplication you will have two independent buttons, each with an independently editable shape and a shadow linked to its own shape:
