In a MySQL system, how are developers and QAs given copies of the database for testing purposes?

Let me give you a real-world example. We have three main instances (codebase, and databases) Live Dev Demo All three have different data on them, and logically separate codebases (though promotion from dev into demo and live is an ongoing task.) Most of our testing is done in Dev. However, there are some things where you really, really, need to test against live data. For this we have a tool that "creates an instance" (generally as a clone of one of the others).  The tool has a bunch of options so we can, say, spin up a clone of the live ledger codebase, the dev customer-database codebase, but the live databases from each. (Our architecture is more complex than these two subsystems, but you get the point.) We used to do the clones on demand, but found it was taking about 90 minutes to do a full clone... ... so these days we also spin up a full clone of live automatically at 4am, every morning, and the first person who needs a test instance gets to "adopt" it rather than have to clone another. I've just had a look, and we have about 35 test instances at the moment - each has the name of an "owner" and a mandatory notes field about what it was set up to test. About once a quarter, someone (normally me) goes through and kills off the old ones... They run, by default, on the same hardware as the live service. The tool we use for this provisioning is on version 1.21, and dated the 2-Jul-2015, so from this, you can safely assume that it's evolved over time.