Hi Ladga,
If I do a ‘minimal copy’ from production to sandbox, I’m aware that this will update the configuration which is what I want, however, what I’m unsure of is if there are entities in sandbox which are not in production, will this copy overwrite/delete these entities and make sandbox exactly the same as production or does it rather just add the production configuration and keep any additional configuration that was previously in sandbox?
It will drop the existing sandbox and create a new copy of production. It doesn't merge any configuration with what is pre-existing in the sandbox instance. So you end result would be an exact copy of Production without the data, but all of the configuration.
Is it better to create a solution file in production and import that into sandbox? However if there are additional entities in sandbox (that do not exist in production) I suspect that these entities will still be present after the solution file is deployed, so I will manually have to delete the additional configuration in sandbox to make sure it is exactly the same as production.
You are correct. Going with the Solution route from Production to Sandbox any entities in sandbox or other configuration you want to remove, you will have to manually delete it to make it an "exact" copy of Production. This route has a risk if you miss something in the cleanup activities is you could deploy it to your production environment.
Hope this helps.
