Trouble recreating my site locally
So, without knowing more about your production and dev environments, it's hard to say. 

Most people would probably advocate moving your codebase with GIT, rather than manually as FTP programs will usually not move files prefixed like your .htaccess file (which maybe causing your whitescreen). If you're going the manual route, I would rsync a copy of your production sites folder, zip it, and the move it to your local computer, install drupal from scratch, then move your files over, set up the db and settings.php for your local environment, run update.php, and profit.