I've decided to go with a development and production environment now with our site and noticed something when I upgraded to 2.7.0h on the dev site. In the records and csv export functions I get the following error:
Fatal error: Cannot access empty property in /[joomlaroot]/administrator/components/com_dtregister/models/member.php on line 134
Here's what I did to make the DEV site:
copied the joomla directory to a new location
used mysqldump and mysql to copy the database to a new database
changed configuration.php to reflect the new database name and user
updated apache config to point dev site to new directory