No no, I just mean that with a platform like ExpressionEngine, there isn’t always one, official way of doing things. There are a variety of ways that you could set up a sandbox environment and then work between that and your production environment.
Since you and Mike already started down a thread of him sharing examples of how he does it with you asking questions specific to his setup, I thought it better to let you continue that conversation with him and others in the community than presume that we could offer official support for the way he likes to set up his server environments.