Is this Time Machine behavior normal? I plugged the Time Machine Hard Drive on the iMac and clicked &quot;Back Up now&quot; in the menu bar, after making sure that nothing was excluded from the process in the Preferences panel.
After I used recovery mode to erase, install the os and restore my data from Time Machine to a new computer.
Once this process completed, I noticed a few odd things:

A lot of the items in the &quot;Downloads&quot; folder were not present
When I reopened Safari, the application state of Safari was not restored

Obviously this is very frustrating.
Are my results normal to expect a mirrored Mac with everything perfect?
There are several ways to clone your drive. One way is to use the app Super Duper. The app is not free but has a free trial version that you can download from the link above.
You'll need to start with a clean drive and you can make a clone of your internal drive. It is a simple procedure and the complete instructions are given here. This link is dated 3/2020 so it is recent. The instructions will tell you how to make a bootable clone.
After making a bootable clone, the linked article has a section telling you how to restore your Mac from a clone if necessary. And there are other features given in the article as well.