How to set test enviroment with a large database?

I'm building an application with ruby on rails 4. It's a frontend to make searches in the database, and now I want to set the rails testing framework on it.

But the standard test enviroment reset and repopulate the test database every time, and i have lots of data, so it's not practical.

At the moment I made a local copy of the database, and overrided the db:reset task, so it won't be dropped every time.

Is there a better way to do this?