Duplicate an Umbraco site to another account

Question

Is it possible to duplicate a live Umbraco site which we have full access to (Backoffice, passwords etc.) and copy its content into another account?

The idea is that we want a clone of the live site to practice on without danger of changing something and accidentally ruining the currently working and published live site.

To simplify, we have:

1. A working live Umbraco site with admin privileges so we can access all files.
2. A new, separate Umbraco account which is essentially a blank canvas with access to all files.

We would like to duplicate all the files and content from the live site to the new account just to have something that closely resembles the live site to practice building widgets etc.

We are working in Visual Studio 2012 with C# and Razor and want to use the latest version of Umbraco CMS (currently 7.3.0-beta Prerelease according to NuGet Package Manager).

Have I got the right idea with this approach or is there a better way? I am aware of Umbraco Courier but would like to know if there are any options other than a paid-for add-on.

If this is the best approach, what is the procedure, and if not, what are the options and why are they preferable?

Answer 1

This can be achieved quite easily by copying the files to a new environment, restoring a backup of the database to a new environment and then updating the connection string in the web.config. This will give you a working copy of the live site. If you are looking for a continuously synchronised solution then that is a different matter, Courier has never worked for me reliably.