Replica of PROD

Replication of prod to non-prod is risky for the following reasons.
(1) Sensitive or secure data should not exist in DEV - should scrub before migration
(2) Users and emails will transfer - don't want to send dev emails to real users

Replicating would consist of KDBs (in memory data like processes) and the DB. They are two separate things to migrate, but again, not advised. If you can manually replicate to look at an issue, that would be advised.

Thanks Christine - Coming to point 2 , email configuration is done on different account , infact email address for all the users in dev are configured with test email address so no issues with the email notifications. I agree with the sensitive information . Just out of interest , is it just copying the KDB's would create a copy of production data ?

For the email notifications if you copy the kdb's you'd also get the users from prod -including their emails, so I think you still need to be wary of the email issue

The KBDs would be all in memory data, users (that is why I made the email reference), process instances, rules/constants/interfaces, etc. It is just like you are doing an upgrade.
Again, I really recommend against this, but welcome other's thoughts

we follow below process in our project
1. copy the kdb from prod to dev environment
2. Update the environment config constant if any so that it should not refer to prod.
3. create a utility process model to update the email addresses of users in dev system to test email address after kdb deployment.

Note: If you are doing these first time make sure you document the process so that next time you dont need to reinvent the wheel.

you can replicate prod environment to another non-prod environment by copying the kdbs, changing custom.properties to fit to dev, cloning database(should have same name as prod..if using oracle...you can ask DBA to clone prod db using oracle access manager)...then copy the data files under /_admin, plugins, jboss with cache...this is easy for doing non-nfs environments...if there is nfs for joining data files on multiple servers...then its little more complicated