[support] Staging question

Thanks for many helps from this list, I am getting close to deploy a Drupal site. Since I can't stage on my local machine (ISP uses MySQL v4, which I can't find download for OSX, and I already burnt once by uploading v5 file from my local machine), I need to create a staging site on my server. I created a duplicated DB, renamed 'stage'.

The question is the next step. Do I have to duplicate everything to stage.<sitename>.com directory? I really do not wish to do this since, not only audio/video files are big, synching the two might be a nightmare.

I googled around. I see a few posts asking for how to do a staging site, but no hit on any answer to this question.