A container does not make restoring easier in the situation you have described. The host for the containers still needs to be configured. That's where changes

A container does not make restoring easier in the situation you have described. The host for the containers still needs to be configured. That's where changes to NIC identifiers, etc. need to be handled. In my situation, the host gets exactly the same configuration. The only things that care about the name of the NIC are a quick grep -r away in /etc/; 95% of everything will be up when I get the firewall script redone, and because that's properly parameterized, I only need to change the value of $IF_MAIN at the top.