Here are a few links to from our discussion at yesterday's GRupal meetup.
Pantheon provides Drupal specific hosting tools and gives you two sites for free. This can be useful for getting the hang of the three tier development, testing and production infrastructure, and can be a useful development tool to try out new modules and configuration.
http://drupalize.me/series/introduction-git-series
Pantheon bases their three tier management on Git. In this series from Drupalize Me there are a few free videos that introduce the key concepts of Git as it relates to Drupal
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/agedu/
Here's a shell utility that will check the usage and relative age of the files on your server. The report it provides would be a good first step if you're planning a file system cleanup.
Comments
Patrick, thanks for posting
Patrick, thanks for posting that recap and the links to some of the things we talked about.
I would also like to recap, for at least Jack (who couldn't make it) that one way I have been able to successfully backup a site and set up a test site on a subdomain or localhost is:
1) Use the Backup & Migrate module (http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate) to download a copy of your current production database as a zip file.
2) Use an FTP client such as FileZilla (https://filezilla-project.org/) to connect to your production site and download all of your public_html files to your local machine. DO NOT REMOVE THE FILES from your production site, just copy them all to your local machine so that you can upload them to the test site later. In FileZilla, you can select them all, right-click, and select the Download option. This will download copies of all the files for you to a directory of your choosing.
3) Set up your test environment. This will vary depending on what you want it to be. If I need to let a client or anyone else view the test site I will set it up on a subdomain like http://test.example.com.
4) Assuming you are setting it up on a subdomain, create a new database for it and import your production site's database via phpmyadmin or something.
5) Before you upload your files to the test domain you should change some settings in your sites/default/settings.php file. You have to make two changes: change the root domain from example.com to test.example.com; change the database name from the name of the production site's database to the test site's database. Save the file.
6) Upload test site files to the public_html directory of the new test.example.com subdomain. Your test site should be working now.
7) In order to prevent search engines from indexing your test site (you don't want two versions of the same site indexed by search engines because typically you don't want users finding the test site to begin with), you should put the site into maintenance mode. Also, you might want to alter the robots.txt file to disallow the entire site. Like this:
Disallow: /
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
I hope this is helpful and that I haven't missed any important steps (I wrote this mostly from memory). If someone catches something or has anything to add, please do so!