It is fantastic that you are thinking carefully about your production site and how to protect the followers you’ve gained.
When using All-in-One WP Migration, it’s important to know its strengths. It’s an amazing tool for moving and backing up entire websites. However, it works by replacing everything on the production site with what’s in the backup file. This is why followers added on the live site are overwritten—they’re not part of the development backup.
It sounds like what you’re truly looking for is a way to sync changes between your development and production sites without losing important live data like followers. Unfortunately, All-in-One WP Migration isn’t built for syncing; it’s designed for full backups and migrations. Syncing requires a different kind of tool that merges data instead of replacing it.
That said, your passion for maintaining your live data while improving your site is inspiring. Finding the right tool for syncing will allow you to keep your data while continuing to build and improve your site.
I hope this helps. 😊