Django 1.4 - assertQuerysetEqual - how to use method

try this:

self.assertQuerysetEqual(
    tree_record_qs,
    [repr(r) for r in tree_record_backup]
)

it's a bit weird and undocumented; but, that should work for you.

assertQuerysetEqual takes a queryset, a list of values and a transform callable which is called on the queryset to convert it into something comparable to the list of values. By default this callable is repr. This is kind of irritating since it doesn't actually compare two querysets, but the easy fix for most cases is using map(repr, your_second_queryset) for the list of values. This is documented in django since version 1.3.