An easy solution could be something like this(I have done several times):
- Automated nightly(scheduled) job to back -content / assets / source - (specific paths) from one Author to another environment.
Basically, We created a Scripts which nightly runs "automated' from Jenkins; run package: prepare/builds/backups/for target site ( base on a certain path for content/assets/source ) and move up to Amazon S3(or any other way) is now past the test phase and should be ready for after review .
Variables in the scripts allow these to run on dev/qa/stage/prod or any other environments. Easily adaptable to additional env setup as well .
After that, we take data from Amazon s3 and install in lower environment in order to get always clean environments. In addition, all backups have their own SCM - versioning strategy in case we need to restore a specific version.