Here\'s what I want to do.
Develop a Django project on a development server with a development database. Run the south migrations as necessary when I change the model.<
You can at least inspect the sql generated by doing manage.py migrate --db-dry-run --verbosity=2. This will not do anything to the database and will show all the sql. I would still make a backup though, better safe than sorry.
manage.py migrate --db-dry-run --verbosity=2