Copy SharePoint 2013 Prod environment to Dev.

[Anand Prakash Singh]

Hello Friends,

Currently no Dev environment in our Org, only Production SharePoint 2013 Farm is there.

Now, I need to prepare the Development SharePoint Farm (Single server farm) from scratch and then need to keep the same as Prod is.

So could you please guide:

* What else I need to copy from Prod like Site Collection content Database?

* Should I also copy the services database like search, my profile, etc.. or anything else?

Please guide the best practise and time-saving steps...

[#2]

@Anand Prakash Singh 

I wouldn't recommend copying PROD to Dev. For data security this is not a good idea. It would also be difficult to do(I have heard some talk of the odd company doing this)

My recommendation would be to get any custom solutions built in Dev, tested on a Test environment and then deployed to PROD. Test should match PROD as mush as possible whereas Dev will get messy if you are doing Dev on it. 

[#3]

Hello Andrew,

Thank you very much for the guidance, that make sense.

So if i prepare test farm like Prod, so could you please guide , when need to copy from Prod servers.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

@Anand Prakash Singh

Same applies, I wouldn't recommend copying PROD to TEST. I would recommend installing any custom solutions on Test, testing them and then deploying to PROD. That gives you a route to PROD for custom code and satisfies a basic Software Life Cycle management.

By all means have some test content on Test but copying the whole DB is rarely actually required and isn't a good idea as I mentioned for data security etc.  

[#5]

OK, you mean to prepare the Dev or Test environment from scratch and configure the required services manually and use accordingly..

I think yes, It's best option to keep in mind the data security part.

Thank you very much, I hope this will help others also to follow this as a best practice.