I remember those jolly days when you could just clone production DB and restore it into your local machine. These days I can't even do it to a single of our av

I remember those jolly days when you could just clone production DB and restore it into your local machine. These days I can't even do it to a single of our avg size tables. Anyway, counting on production data for testing is a mistake. We do a couple of things 1. Testing For testing we use fixtures with a build and tear process. Basically building the test with data and in tear down clearing the database. Language and framework is irrelevant here, every single one that I know of has this features built in. 2. Staging/Princess For staging, we clone production periodically but we have a "whitening" process. a. Remove all emails, remove all keys/tokens. b. Delete tables for stats that only relate to production (orders etc...) c. Delete all push tokens, no one from staging will ever get tweeted/push notification or anything like that. I would NEVER point staging/test to production, not even for read only. Staging/Test should be on a security group that doesn't even have access to production DB.