It seems like it would be a nice thing to add into OpenACS: knowledge of what type of installation it is. If we created a few simple functions that could determine what the server was (staging, development, production), then we could do a lot of neat things like wrap ns_sendmail with a debug mail operation to the developer when it is a developer site, etc...
Sorry, that doesn't answer your question. I haven't run into this problem personally, as I keep copies of the production database on my production server. I don't see why this couldn't be done for staging as well..
