The system copy
Planning Guide for the Connector for SAP Landscape Management
In order to have up-to-date data and exactly the same software versions on an SAP test system for meaningful tests as are active on the production system, the production systems are regularly copied completely to the test system. However, many settings in the test system must be retained, because a test system should not act like a production system and, for example, send documents to customers and suppliers or trigger something in production.
Creating a consistent storage replica - splitting a clone or creating a snapshot on the disk array. Regardless of the storage size, this process takes only a few seconds.
Hybrid: for example, the source systems on-premises and the target systems on cloud
A non-production SAP system should also have the same repository status as the source system, regardless of the data transfer method chosen for the refresh. All the data that makes up an SAP system is stored in the repository. This includes, among other things, the definitions for the database fields and tables for master and transaction data.
If you have used "Shortcut for SAP Systems" to save system-specific tables before the system refresh, several manual steps can be omitted - the data can be restored by restoring the data saved before the system copy.
As mentioned above, an SAP system copy created for updates is a special use case of homogeneous system copy.