I've done some digging around for this a while back and the only thing that made sense to me was the following (and note that this is my personal setup. It coul

I've done some digging around for this a while back and the only thing that made sense to me was the following (and note that this is my personal setup. It could use work, but this has done fine through Linux reinstalls): * Keep your dotfiles somewhere that can be synced back easily (e.g. Dropbox, VPS with rsync, git repo, whatever) * Make all dotfiles symlinks to the above. This way, if anything were to blow your hard drive up, it will have a relatively painless recovery. * Keep workspace stuff/code/things not too easily replaceable in a separate physical drive if possible. Mount this drive to whatever directory that would make sense to you through your fstab or whatever method you prefer. Adding the nofail option in your fstab is also a good idea if you won't have it connected all the time. Reason for all this: You can now wipe your Linux HDD more confidently if you ever need to do so. Important dotfiles and configs should all be safe, code is on a separate drive and other stuff is backed up off-site hopefully.