[EricGT]

For something like that, I'll usually turn off the primary database long enough to rsync the database binaries to the new location. It is much faster. Once a copy of the binaries have been made, you can overwrite the test DB over and over, as needed, and do so very quickly. If you are doing a DB dump, don't include the searchindex/postindex table and the attachments table, if you are storing attachments in the database. You probably won't need this info for an upgrade attempt. When I was still storing attachments in the DB, these two tables alone accounted for about 61% of my total DB size. Eric