As I said... the first thing you should see after creating a CLONE site, is a site that is absolutely identical in every way to your ORIGINAL site.
Afterall, the new site is an exact COPY.
If you are not seeing an IDENTICAL SITE (identical in EVERY WAY - including customers, products, orders, ezpages...) then you have not made the CLONE correctly.
Many customisations that site owners put in place over the months and years are a COMBINATION of code changes AND database changes. For example, when you add a CUSTOM template, the "instruction" to load that template and all of its settings (eg: sideboxes) are stored in the database.
So if you do a "fresh install", then link that to another database, there will be inconsistencies... How will the "fresh install" cope with trying to apply a template, when the custom files for that template are not there - but the settings in the database are instructing the system to apply that template...
Just remember to NOT TOUCH the original files, or tamper with the original database.
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