Regarding mirroring from a local environment to a hosted environment, there are too many variables to discuss in a comment thread, most of them depending on your specific host. I’ve used GoDaddy in the past, and am currently experimenting with Media Temple. The Media Temple dv (dedicated virtual) setup gives you full control over your server environment, so I imaging you could do any kind of mirroring required. Also, I know there are WP post duplication plugins, so you might want to look into those, at least for the WP content duplication.

Can you please explain?

I’m trying to create a mirror of on my home computer so i can test new versions of WP upgrades, code and plug ins before promoting back to the live (web) version.

Your steps above dont’ explain how to move the database or duplicate / mirror from the ‘live’ to local environment.

Any ideas / advice?

Thanks.

I’m using :
Word Press 2.7
System Software : Mac OS X 10.5.7 (9J61)
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac7,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

MAMP has the following programs versions installed:

Apache 2.0.59
MySQL 5.0.41
PHP 4.4.7 & 5.2.5
APC 3.0.14
eAccelerator 0.9.5.1
XCache 1.2.0
phpMyAdmin 2.10.2
Zend Optimizer 3.2.2
SQLiteManager 1.2.0
Freetype 2.3.4
t1lib 5.1.1
curl 7.16.2
jpeg 6b
libpng-1.2.18
gd 2.0.28
libxml 2.6.29
libxslt 1.1.21
gettext 0.16.1
libidn 0.6.14
iconv 1.11
mcrypt 2.5.8
YAZ 3.0.6 & PHP/YAZ 1.0.12