Maybe this is more a 'note to self' than anything else. No matter how much you think you won't need a database when you drop it, just make a backup before you do anyway.

Today for example, there is a server which has 2 environments on it: dev.example.com and staging.example.com. The client said they had pending changes on staging. We knew the client was only working on one environment.

So I thought it was safe to copy the staging environment over to dev, and I did!

Navicat is a cross platform (linux/mac/windows) MySQL/PostgreSQL client with a built-in SSH tunnel. This means if you have SSH access, you can use the same 'localhost' credentials as your web app, regardless of what IP you're accessing the site from. http://www.navicat.com/download/download.html