The main purpose of my backup is for getting back to doing invoiceable hours after the statistically inevitable hardware failure or misplacement (I've yet to lo

The main purpose of my backup is for getting back to doing invoiceable hours after the statistically inevitable hardware failure or misplacement (I've yet to lose a laptop, fingers crossed). It's not that the data on those VMs is irreplaceable, any significant work output will be in a VCS outside my laptop anyway. It's that rebuilding it from pieces in case of loss requires work that no client will pay for. That being the case, I much prefer being able to re-image my home dir partition into a new laptop/ssd and get back to paying work, over to having to fiddle with individual VMs that only exist as partial backups. Edit: I've actually considered the opposite of what you suggest, just doing a raw partition image for backup. SSD is really fast, ethernet is fast, and the runtime would be consistent. Just haven't got it out of me to try it in practice.