I would personally test it in a non-production environment, but a lot of people like to run the betas in a production environment which is a bad idea.
If I were to beta test, I'd probably load my database in a virtual machine and run it in a test environment before going live.
You can beta test all you want, but in the end, until you try it out extensively in the real worlds you are not going to find the real bugs. The first V6.0.4, ran fine on my home computer (a quad core at the time) but bogged down on the P4s in the office.
AC's betas are more stable than many final products which goes to explain why they leave some, like V6.1.2 floating out there as "permanent beta's." While I expect them to be stable, I will run them in a pre-production environment, my home computer. Yes, I suppose they could corrupt my home computer if they were really messed up, and that would require me to do a backup restore, but in the 10 years of running AC I have yet to have any major system problems from a program. I do run virtual machines on my home computer but they are Win8 and Ubuntu. Also, I sometimes will fire up my copy of AC when I am online to research a question here. It takes longer to open a virtual machine. I am not arguing with Sandeep, that IS an excellent idea. I guess I am more explaining why I don't do it that way.
