A few systems we have used now allow for instant cloning of prod branches. postgres.ai and upsun.com both do this. The trick is to back the prod filesystem/db with ZFS or another filesystem that does copy-on-write which allows for whats kind of a "fork" operation where you can shallow copy a directory, it only tracks the differences. This is insanely usefull as we use it to clone a 20GB DB in like < 2s, run some tests against it, then destroy the db. You could totally the same.