No, I changed the settings in the admincp as instructed in Trevor's tutorial. i've not made any changes to the database clone which my hosting co. made for me. I've compared its size to my live database and it's smaller which indicates that the live one continues to grow and the clone does not.
I agree that having a forum for testing is much better than fiddling with the live one. I'll get it sorted out eventually. Thanks, Lynne