The stagingcopy utility and the production database
The stagingcopy utility allows an administrator to copy data from the production database to the staging or authoring database.
The stagingcopy utility should only be used in specific administrative situations, such as setting up a new staging server or recovery from a corrupt staging server database.
The stagingcopy utility ensures that the production and staging or authoring databases are synchronized. After the stagingcopy utility runs successfully, the database tables managed by the staging server should never be updated on the production database. You should update these tables on the staging server then use the stagingprop utility to propagate the changes to the production database.
Updating staging server-managed tables on the production database will likely fail due to a potential key conflict or reference integrity violation. If update the staging server-managed tables in the production server database, use the stagingcopy utility to synchronize the staging and production databases.
To guarantee that the staging-enabled tables are never updated on the production database, the tables must be under the control of a Site Administrator only. In some cases, the staging-enabled tables in your production database are updated by an individual customer or merchant after the data has been copied using stagingcopy. For example, you cannot prohibit a merchant from modifying the OFFER table in the production database after copying to the production database. In this situation the OFFER table cannot be managed by the staging server.
Related tasks
Testing a site on a staging server
Listing server-managed tables
Related Reference
Staging server limitations
stagingcopy utility
stagingprop utility