I’d like to clone our production Octopus management server to test upgrading to the latest version of Octopus. Are there any gotchas or is there any downside to doing so? I plan to run some deployments to our test and pre-production environments side by side with the original server.
Hi,
Thanks for getting in touch! There are some things to note here.
Most importantly, unless you have a High Availability/Data Centre license, you will need a separate database per Octopus instance. Connecting multiple instances to a single database will change your configuration to High Availability and stop you from deploying.
We have some documentation which covers recommended strategy here.
We also have a documentation page for backing up and restoring the database.
Let me know if you have any further question here or run into any issues. 
Best regards,
Daniel