| I often set up a "how to create a dev environment" wiki and then we exercise it many many times. IBM got a bad shipment of laptop hard drives that exhibited a MTBF of about 2 years, and our equipment dept bought a stack of laptops from that batch. Over a summer we had 6 machines go belly up. Mine was number #5. People still looked at me like I announced that I had stage 3 cancer. Oh you poor poor man. I found this reaction disappointing. By then the process was about as documented as any I've had. It just took me a day to get it up and running (because the base image left a very slow step until after 2nd boot, which I still maintain is dumbness squared). A coworker from that cohort had an experience that I still use as an example. He tried to put his work laptop in the back seat of his car. He missed and hit the door frame. Killed the laptop. Similarly, taking your laptop down the stairwell could be a one way trip to the trash bin. If the information is important for us GET IT OFF OF YOUR COMPUTER. As soon as you know. Put it in storage, or at the very least in some coworker's head/computer. If you do this, consistently, then losing your machine is a shitty inconvenience, but nothing more dire than that. |
My co-workers were appalled, but I had less than a day of downtime each time. With continuous backup to an external drive (always on while I'm working), a password manager I can also store certs in, and keeping everything important in a cloud-backed git repo, there isn't a single thing on my work computer that's hard to replace. It's been fantastic.