How to organize work on the Bitrix combat site?

Question

1C-Bitrix

In order not to break a working site, you need to create a copy of it.
But the question arises: create a local copy or on the same hosting?
If on a hosting, then how to implement it and not duplicate the upload folder, but redirect to it (it weighs a lot).
And are there any features of working with git?

Answer 1

locally of course. As for the upload folder, you can proxy requests at the web server level.
Example for nginx:

location ~ ^/upload/? {
  try_files $uri @prod;
}		
  
location @prod {
  proxy_pass https://production-site.ru:443;
}

Well, something like that. Not ideal, but better than downloading a folder locally. Some things do not work, for example, image resizing, something else is possible, but in principle it is enough for development.
UPD:
another option is to mount the upload folder via sshfs. But it does not work very stable, unfortunately, and not very fast. Must be mounted in readonly/