It is understandable that you may want to set up Audit Trail Classic on a test server in order to test out a new feature, test an upgrade before rolling it out to all users or to simply try out the product for the first time.
Your licence permits you to install Audit Trail Classic on any number of servers or machines as long as you are using the same Raiser's Edge serial number. If you have a different serial number for your test Raiser's Edge then please get in contact with us and we will see if we can help.
Most organisations take a backup copy of their production Raiser's Edge database and use it on their test server. If Audit Trail Classic is already setup on your production server you may think that it is simply a case of installing the client and starting.
However there is an important step that you need to do before proceeding.
Audit Trail Classic stores connection information to the Raiser's Edge database and to the audit tables within the Raiser's Edge database itself. If you are making changes to a constituent on the production database Audit Trail knows to save those on the audit table in the production database. If you simply copy over the RE DB from production to test, when you make a change to a constituent on test it will attempt to write the change back to the audit table on the production database.
To overcome this you should always run the server setup on the test server before starting to make any changes. You will need to do this each time you refresh your test server with a copy of the production database.
After that you should be good to go. Just ensure that when you do make a change on test, it is recorded in the test database and not on production.