In the past, I had some environment specific dependencies-- installed libraries and services-- that I couldn't easily backup and wasn't easy to set up. In this

In the past, I had some environment specific dependencies-- installed libraries and services-- that I couldn't easily backup and wasn't easy to set up. In this case, I would use a VM to do my development on and back up the VM image regularly. Lately, I'm doing Rails development. Using Git, RVM and Bundler makes re-deploying my development environment a piece of cake, so I just make sure to have my source code backed up.