How to align a development environment with production in Microsoft Dynamics CRM (365)?

Hello,

I am new to the Microsoft CRM world, and I have encountered some major issues.

I currently have a project with two environments: one for development and one for production.

• The development environment contains unmanaged solutions, but it is slightly outdated.
• The production environment contains managed solutions, but there is a problem:
  • Some forms in certain entities contain unmanaged layers (which should not be there).

My question is: how can I align the development environment with the production environment?

Possible approaches I am considering:

1. Manually recreate those fields in the development environment, create a new solution (export it as managed for production), remove the unmanaged layers, and publish it to production.
   1. Would this cause any data loss?
2. Copy the current production environment to a fresh environment, change the managed/unmanaged status of the solutions and their components.
   1. Is this even possible?
3. Access the base code of the default solution somewhere and import it into a fresh environment.

4. Any other recommended approaches?

Thank you.