Years ago I started treating my local workstation as ephemeral. Anything that needed persistence I pushed elsewhere. Generally speaking: * Documents go in Goog

Years ago I started treating my local workstation as ephemeral. Anything that needed persistence I pushed elsewhere. Generally speaking: * Documents go in Google Drive * Photos go in Google Photos * Code goes to Github * App settings sync via however that app syncs. This turned my workstation into basically a combination of: * My dotfiles (which I used to sync with https://github.com/ingydotnet/ https://github.com/ingydotnet/... and now sync with https://github.com/akerl/smoosh https://github.com/akerl/smoosh ) * A quick trip through the preferences pane * Installing a handful of apps. At the height of this, I was working to use Puppet to configure my Mac, and once a week or so I'd throw it into recovery mode, do a full wipe / reinstall, and run puppet, to test the state of my bootstrapping. These days I don't bother: none of my local settings are that complex.