Turning the normal progression of development on it's head, what I am looking to do is take a copy of a production site and put it on a sandbox.
I am currently using D 7.36 and Civi 4.4.14
My intention is to take a copy of the working site from the live server and place on a local XAMPP so that I can experiment with ideas and test things such as how to implement Eileen's Permissions as ACLs 1.2 branch - specifically I am not sure how to install Entity Settings as it talks about registrations and PHP ... I would rather not do that on a live server.
I am not too fussed about taking the live contact and organisation data because I would create a large number of test contacts to do all that.
The problem is that our developer also included a custom member management module, so I want to ensure that all the right things are copied across so that it will work.
I did search through the usual sources, but I can to the conclusion that lots of them require disabling CiviCRM, I was of the opinion that I am likely to break it by doing that!