acquia cloud - images in content break, different path local vs cloud/server

Question

On my local dev environment, my images are stored in (relative to server root) /sites/default/files/images/

On the server, acquia cloud implements a virtual directory and the end result is that images are stored relative to root in /files/images

In my content nodes, I'm using root-relative paths for my images. But this means any time I migrate my content between the local environment and the server, all images break.

I don't want to have to take any manual steps to change image paths every time I migrate content (I migrate content "down" from server to lcal periodically so that I am developing against "real" content).

Shouldn't there be some simpler way to configure things so that the root-relative image paths can intelligently choose the correct path based on which environment is being accessed?