I maintain an offline development version of my live site which I use to add new products and product displays as well as test recommended module or core updates before manually updating the live site with a revised db (and supporting files).

My primary problem is that orders (and lots of intermingled data) come into the live site while I'm making said updates to the offline dev site, which are then "lost" when I later manually update the live site.

This can't be the ideal workflow.

Can someone suggest a better process?