Make a copy of the live site for localhost testing
You can easily do this with the backup and migrate module. If you have lots of dynamic content you should be using this module to schedule a backup on cron jobs too.

Before I learned how to use the MySQL command line, because phpmyadmin has an import file size limit, I would compress a whole website with the backups in a private file path and move it to a new server. Then I just remove the database settings and install a new installation of Drupal. After I will enable the backup and migrate module and restore that last database.