Use Matomo in Staging/Production Environments

In some set-ups with staging and production environments, statistics plugins which store their data in the main WordPress database pose problems. Hosting plans like Dreamhost’s Dreampress plan have an all-or-nothing arrangement when copying an environment’s database up or down: you can only copy the entire database, and cannot skip individual tables.

In those all or nothing situations, if we copy the production environment down to the staging environment, then do some work on the site in the staging environment for a few days, and then copy back up to the production environment, there will have been no stats about visitors to the production site collected for those several days; the staging database over-writes the database in the production environment when we copy up, erasing the data collected in the interim period.

Is that also the case with the Matomo Analytics plugin for WordPress? If so, is there any way around that?

Is Matomo On-Premise a possible alternative? Does Matomo On-Premise keep data in a separate database all together? And if so, the production site will continue to add statistics into the database all along, regardless of copying up or down – right?