scanned files larger than original, timemachine, mac os

[tonari]

Hi,
macOS Monterey 12.0.1
FreeFileSync 11.14 [donation]

overall, things usually work great.

In this situation I am scanning a 4TB hard drive (external) that was used as a timemachine drive.
when I scan to mirror its contents to a larger hard drive, it reports 35 TB as the amount of files needed to copy to the destination.

I thought it might be alias files that made FFS rescan the same areas as "new"... and I forcefully removed some of those...

but, it seems that I am not making progress.

I searched for a solution, it seems that it might have been solved years ago, but I am not having any luck.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

thanks,

John Kelly