Ensure that creating a development environment provides an exact copy of the live database, instead of just an empty or partial one.

[Kull1z]

Issue description

In many cases – and for us, most of the time – you need to create an exact copy of the live site when setting up a new environment. Currently, when creating a development environment, you don’t get an exact copy of the live database. It would be very useful if the system instead provided this option, ensuring that development or staging environments are true replicas. This would save time, guarantee consistency, and make it easier to restore the development environment if it needs to be deleted.

[mclausen]

Hi @Kull1z, thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts! 🙏

The current behavior is intentional. Each environment in Cloud is a fully isolated environment, and keeping them in sync automatically (so they’re always true replicas of live) would require continuous synchronization which I think would lead into all sorts of problems. So, that’s not how Cloud environments are designed to be used.

A good way to think about it is like this:

• Code and schema changes flow left → right (from development → staging → live).
• Content and data flows right → left (from live → staging → development).

For most development workflows, you don’t need the full live dataset to work on a feature, and copying it every time would make environment provisioning much much slower, and incur a performance hit on you live site because of the backup operation.

That said, when you do need the live data, there are a couple of ways to achieve it manually today:

1. Restore from Backoffice – Use the deploy feature to restore data from live into another environment.
2. Manual backup & restore of databases – Take a backup of the live environment and restore it into development (note: this does not include images, only the database).

We hear your point about wanting to have it as part of the provisioning of new environments, and we'll add it to our list of features to look into 👍

Again, Thank you for your input 🚀

Kind regards
@mclausen, Cloud Platform Teamlead.

[Kull1z]

Hi @mclausen. Thanks for the reply. We are using the manual backup & restore to do this today. Just thought i would be nice if there was an option to do it automaticlly.

Have a great day!