[etherael]

I do a version of this that doesn't require restore at all, I have three separate physical systems that all share a VPN across the world, and wherever I am at any given time zfs snapshots are syncing across that VPN to those three physical systems depending on which one is the primary I'm using at any given point in time. They also use the VPN layer to check if they have peer status on a faster local network like the wifi or LAN and use that instead for the snapshot transfers if so.

If for any reason any one of these systems either is destroyed or is no longer master, picking up from where I left off is as simple as picking another system up and marking it "master". No restore process, no changes, nothing at all, and it picks up from exactly where I left off when I was working on the other system. Means I can just grab my EDC laptop and stuff it in a bag not knowing how long I'll be out or where I'll be going and also know that it will be completely up to date with my datasets, or I can grab my desktop replacement laptop and its enormous external disk if I am going to be on a different continent for an extended period of time and want full geographic dataset locality. At no point in time does any of the above require the manual running of any process or replication or anything like that.

Reprovision and restore would take a whole lot longer than this, wouldn't give the abilities that it provides, and the above is only possible because of zfs snapshot replication.

I also use a USB C external SSD that is a member of a ZFS mirror and a md raid group that is bootable, so even if my EDC laptop were to spontaneously combust, I could immediately get up and running on any similar laptop with roughly comparable hardware simply by putting that SSD in and booting from it, then adding the SSD on the laptop to the zfs mirror / md raid group.