The short answer to both of you @pm74 and @SorinGFS is your development and production environments should be atomic, the data on those should not matter in the slightest.
Usually you would pull down some snapshot (or cleaned snapshot) of the production database, make a few changes, and build a .sql migration script if required. I was just updating a personal project from v3.0.x to v3.4.x and did the exact same thing: