User Profile Service Migration

I am attempting to setup a test farm that has the exact same user profile data and site content as my production farm.

So far i have been able to take copys of the databases i use for the service and the web application, then connect them into my development farm. I created a web application and pointed it to the mysite content database i brought over and when i provisioned the user profile service i connected it to the Profile database and social database i brought over... i did not bring my sync database over because from what i've read it can be recreated with no impact.

Once i had the service provisioned i would go into my timer jobs and turn off the "My Site Cleanup" job and then setup my connection to Active Directory with the connection filters i use in production, also i would configure my user properties we pull in from Active Directory and then i'm ready to sync.

I kick off a full sync and then some incremental syncs, during those syncs i don't see anything flagging me that i feel like i should be concerned about....when i feel like things are good i kick on the "my site clean up" timer job and it starts removing my users from my profile db! ... so if i had a count of say 3500 users before i started i end up with 1200 or so.

I've never really been able to find a definitive process guide that covers how you do what i'm trying to do, so i'm wondering at this point since i've done this serveral times now with the same result, if i'm going about this the wrong way or is there a step i'm overlooking...Scratchin my head as to why it is flagging some accounts for deletion and leaving others alone. If it was one or two accounts i could probably overlook any underlying issues but when it's deleting 1000 plus accounts it concerns me that i cannot sucessfully move this service to another farm if i needed to with profile data in tact.