[bradleyland]

> Even with Time Machine backups, you still spend many hours setting configs after a restore.

But how many hours do you spend establishing, testing, and maintaining a backup plan that mitigates the risk of spending a few hours getting back to working status after a restore?

In my experience, TimeMachine is wonderfully effective at restoring system state (including things like shell customizations, dotfiles, etc). The marginal return on investment in more comprehensive backup setup just doesn't pay dividends. Of course, there's the issue of offsite backups, which typically aren't as comprehensive as TimeMachine.

The point I'm making is that technical folks often have a hard time making value judgements as it relates to technology. Having a backup of your data is 100% necessary. No argument there. Having a backup of your system state? That's not as high a priority, because you're mitigating a future time investment with a current time investment. You have to weigh the two against each other: time spent today versus potentially time spent in the future.