Situation: I have three environments set up. Production, Stage, Development. Content staging works amongst all three environments prior to upgrading to DNN 7.

Problem: After upgrading both development and staging to DNN 7, content staging has stopped working. What my understanding is that AFTER upgrading to DNN 7, they are no longer "cloned sites." I find that extremely annoying.

Possible Solution?: After realizing that content staging does not work as expected in dev/stage environments... I am under the impression that I have no choice BUT to upgrade production first and clone the environments off that DB/ web files instance. This, in my opinion defeats the ENTIRE purpose of setting up dev/stage environments if I have to start from the top and work down, rather than UP to production. I understand it's a good idea to "test" the upgrade in a staging environment but that makes TWICE the work!

Could someone let me know if I am totally off point here? I've gone over this scenario a few times and don't believe there is a way around this issue. How and why are the two environments not "cloned," post upgrade?

I'm not sure that I understand the "no longer 'cloned sites'" comment.

The only way to have to sites be identical is to completely copy one to the other. That includes copying the databases as well as the web directories.

Yes, that's correct. I am under the impression that even after upgrading them separately with the same exact upgrade files they would still be "cloned." I guess that's not the case but still in this instance that's twice the work.... to test the upgrade, then to upgrade production and clone the stage/dev environments can be quite the process.

No, they would not be clones. They would be close, but not guaranteed to be identical.