Sorry - I misread your initial message (got DEV and PROD the wrong way round!)..
We built the TOC index (and associated topics) on DEV initially, so wanted an easy way to replicate them to PROD. Now that we have everything working on PROD then yes - we could just restore from PROD to DEV to bring them back in sync.
However, we treat our DEV system more like a sandbox (for experimentation) - rather than a pre-prod staging area - so there is no pressing need to do this now..