You may hear GrowthZone Support (and other GrowthZone staff) talk about using Clone to test things like merging contacts, membership modifications (upgrades/downgrades/adjustments), and billing.
Clone is a special server environment available to all GrowthZone customers. As part of our weekly processes, GrowthZone makes a copy of your database and everything in it. This database is fully functional in every aspect except email; all email addresses are heavily modified so that no communications are accidentally sent to any contacts, and while it may appear the system is sending messages to these modified emails, it is not actually sending any messaging out into the internet at all.
It is not connected to your live database, but contains all the information in it, and is generally intended to be used for testing and "sandbox" purposes.
This means that changes or updates made in your live database during the week are NOT synced to the Clone environment, and changes or updates to your Clone database are NOT synced to your live database. It is a standalone system and is refreshed every week with a new snapshot of your live database. If you add or change something in your Clone database on a Friday and log in to it again on Monday, those changes will have been overwritten by the data refresh.
If you are an active GrowthZone subscriber, you can log into Clone with your regular GrowthZone username and password.
To Log In: https://gzclone.work/auth?ReturnUrl=%2fa
Once you are logged in to your Clone database, you should see a "ProductionClone" tag in the system header in a bright blue color:
Everything else about your Clone database functions exactly the same as your live (Production) database. You will have access to all your modules and can modify things with no fear of affecting your actual live data or sending accidental emails.
Please note: Clone databases do not have all the resources of a full, live Production database. Processing-heavy tasks- like billing, or exporting of large report result sets- WILL take more time than in your live database due to these reduced resources.