Windows 10: Clone discrepancy vs original - how to find/debug?

For years I used macrium reflect for cloning but recently they had a bug that caused two fails in a row for me so I dropped rather than spend forever trying to figure it out. Using Minitool Shadowmaker now. It has worked great apparently, until I ran it for a very critical setup that has lots of user data that MUST be exactly produced. Now I have a problem as follows

This is all being done with windows 10 pro v1909, updated to this week [april 13-17 2020].
I cloned the C drive which is boot plus programs plus about half of the user's data files. The other data files are on a physically separate drive that will be copied over to a new drive. [copied, not cloned]. The C: drive clone booted and ran fine, nothing looked amiss, until I did some simple compares out of phobia that files would be dropped. There is a roughly 4GB difference.
So, I tediously have been going through the many folders to figure out where the diff lies. 95% of the difference is in Users directory, narrowed to the one key user. Microsoft data is diff, with Outlook files being nearly 2.GB of the diff; the other I'm still sorting.

Is this just a weakness of Shadowmaker in particular, or are there other Clone packages that have the same deficiency?
Is the defect such that even a straight, uncompressed, Copy/Paste of the critical folders going to also produce similar discrepancies? Is this a permissions error? The user account is the same on both drives in this case. That notwithstanding, should I first "take ownership" one folder at a time before the clone process and/or before a manual copying of those crucial folders?

thanks for your experience and advice

c

:)

 

Clone discrepancy vs original - how to find/debug?

Thanks for mentioning Minitool Shadowmaker. I've just downloaded it and started using it. I will backup my SSD to SATA drive mounted in a Docking Station. Macrium Reflect Free wouldn't write to that drive.

Anyway you can mount your backup as a drive and view it's contents in Explorer.

Then you can use a Diff Tool to compare files.

 

Clone discrepancy vs original - how to find/debug?

Do a forensic clone rather than a smart clone. The resulting clone will be exactly the same as the original, byte for byte.

 

Cannot clone original install

Are you dragging and dropping the partitions? The destination drive should be unallocated (clean). Then you click on Clone this disk under the source disk you want to make the clone of. Then you click on Select the disk to clone to in the bottom pane of the next window. Then you click on the destination drive that you want to clone to. Then you drag and drop the partitions you want to clone from the top (source drive) pane to the unallocated space on the bottom (destination drive) pane. You can click on the dropped partitions in the bottom pane and select partition properties to resize the partition when it is cloned. Once you get the destination drive looking the way you want to, click on finish.

Step 1: select Clone this disk under the source disk:




Step 2: Select destination disk





Step 3: Drag and drop partitions





Step 4: Select partition and select cloned partition properties to change the size





Step 5: Everything in desired place and desired size, click Finish