Testing + production server and syncing MySQL data

Question

I have a web application running on LAMP with a testing server and a production server. Is there a standard practice for keeping the data on the testing server in sync with the production server? The data on the testing server gets out of date pretty quick and I feel like there must be an easier way than just dumping the production server and copying it onto the testing server every so often. It's not important that the data is in total sync, just that the testing server represents the production enviornment as accurately as possible.

Answer 1

What I do is create the minimum set of testing data necessary, called fixtures, which I use for development. I don't often sync with my production data unless I know a given feature will deal with an abnormally large data set (100K+ records), in which case I'll sync as much of the data I need to test the given feature. This gives me a consistency between different versions, because I can just reload the fixtures after messing around with my data store.