Comment by TacticalCoder

> So how do you > ... > - maintain this, eg have good, representative testing data lying around?

This one can be very easy, depending on the kind of data you're working with. Many places shall simply dump a part (or the whole if it's not too big) of the production DB into dev and pre-prod environments.

Now if there are sensitive, non-encrypted, data that even the devs cannot see, than it can get tricky (but then arguably they cannot see the logs in the clear either, etc.).

But yeah: a recent dump of the prod DB is good, representative data.

I've worked at places where pre-prod had a daily dump of the prod DB. Simple.