Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A lot of things can get easier if you assume all local state is a transient cache, and master copy is somewhere else. Clearest exa

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A lot of things can get easier if you assume all local state is a transient cache, and master copy is somewhere else. Clearest examples are kiosks and digital billboards, which show a single webpage from remote server. A less common example are embedded devices - while there might be small local storage for settings, it is not managed by OS, and everything traditionally part of OS, like /home, /etc, /var and so on is nonpersistent.