Recover deleted and possibly overwritten partition using Testdisk -- best practice?

Solution 1:

The word "clone" suggests the generation of an exact duplicate. So the sentence

or is that nonsense because the structure on the clone is never the same as the one on the damaged drive? is wrong.

If the drive has any kind of hardware dammage ( for instance unreadable setors) or if you intend to use write-functions within Testdisk (for instance partition table writing or MFT repair) I strongly recommend duplicating the drive to another one with the same sector characteristics like 512e/4096. (e=emulated)

Just copying a partition leaves out some drive meta data information.

It appears that your question in different wording has already been answered here:

https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=11720

What a surprise. :)