Production data in non prod

I am not going to lecture anybody about having PI or sensitive data from production on any of your non prod servers.

Over the years I have seen many methods for getting data from prod to non prod.

I have seen transactional replication setup pulling data from production publisher

I have seen log shipping setup. A sneakier method was to go and copy transaction logs from the destination server and re-applying them.

Copying of database backups from the database server using Robocopy jobs.

Or using Robocopy jobs to pull the backups from the SAN.

An SSIS package to export/import tables.

I am sure that there are lots of other ways that people try to get data refreshes - just keep your eye out.