I've just taking over from a Sharepoint developer who has only worked in a single, live environment.
I want to set up a development environment (and subsequently also a UAT environment) and so to do this I need an exact (or near to exact as possible) clone of the live version, including all site collections, content and (ideally) permissions.
I have Googled and found that you can backup and restore single site collections using the Management Shell but to do each collection individually would be very time consuming.
Can anyone suggest a reliable way to do this?