Sync live server and development server

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
Hmmm ... I think in general it's a Bad Idea to use production data in a testing system. There are security and privacy issues to contend with. From a more pragmatic point of view, your test/development system should have data that is carefully designed to bother your code with edge and corner cases, amongst other stresses. Production data rarely provides a good test set.

Having said that, you could look at some kind of log-shipping approach (actually, that's an Oracle and MS-SQL -ism I think). With MySQL you may be able to set up a database to be a slave replica. In all these cases, though, well certainly MySQL and MS-SQL, the replica is basically forced into read-only mode, so would probably be of limited use to you here.

I suspect that you'll have problems with your provider, though, especially on the slave end of that equation. On the master end, too, I expect that anything managed by a 'control panel' will not be geared up to handle such complexities.