I worked at a company where we had a similar system set up. We had automated database snapshots of production taken every two hours, and stored locally and in o

I worked at a company where we had a similar system set up. We had automated database snapshots of production taken every two hours, and stored locally and in our account at Rackspace's Cloud Files. Eventually, I got fed up with people asking me to update staging with a copy of the production database, so I wrote a simple Python script and stuck it in the repository. As long as you weren't running in a production environment, it would give you a fresh copy of the database in a matter of minutes. We were (slowly) working towards a system where the entire app (gems and all) was self-contained, and we had a list of all the system packages that needed installation; once we reached that point, setting up a new server would have been a five-minute job - a git pull, a package update/install, and a database pull. Sadly, we never did get around to finishing it (actual work took priority), but it would have been nice to have.