Daily rebuild of a development database.

[Dave Farley]

I am running a production and development environment in MySQL. Both the production and the development databases are running on the same physical server. The previous set up was for the development database to be dropped every morning. It is then rebuilt from the backups of the production database. This had never been an issue until we moved from MyIsam tables to InnoDB. Once that was changed the rebuild started taking much longer and began affecting the performance of the production database.

I am going to be moving the development database off of the server that hosts the production database. My second task is going to be to streamline the daily rebuild of the database. I basically need it to be a fresh copy of the production database every morning. I don't know if replication will be an option since there will be testing performed on it. The development database will also only have 7 days of information.

Does anyone know of a less resource intensive method of getting this done? I feel like deleting and readding over 100 GB of data is putting unnecessary strain on the hard drives. Thanks for any input!