In my ongoing evaluation of Drupal7 as a solution for our needs, I've come to the matter of distributed workflow, staging & backup.
We're wading through a number of threads discussing the issues.
So far, I've found far more unanswered questions and frustration with the current state of affairs, than testimony to & evidence of solutions that end users are satisfied with.
A large part of this confusion seems to arise from the lack of a clear definition of the problem & requirements. Or, perhaps more appropriately, a consistent one ...
For our use, we target 4 site stages,
1 live production, offiste, in the cloud
1 staging for pre-production QA, onsite
1 master development for pre-staging testing, onsite
numerous individual development sites, @ desktop & roaming
We require the ability to sync the code, data, and code across these sites.
In particular, we need to provide our developers the ability to rebase their local environments to closely sync to current live production config, data & content.
Their individual, distributed development contributions need to be managed in appropriate version control, with full push-forward, roll-back capbility.
Master development must have the ability to integrate those distributed contributions in prep for eventual push to staging and production.