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Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

So basically, you didn't lost it. Good for you.

Yet using full drive encryption + daily backups (or dropbox or google drive or whatever webfs) + having a spare machine at home (so that you can spare the trip to a computer store and have a machine readily configured) is necessary if you are a professional.

You seem to have underestimated this last point, with your estimation of a full day to have a new one ready.

Having a machine setup and ready can sure take hours - which might not be ok if you have a client waiting. Also, anything else may happen (car broke, computer shop closed / out of computers). I have noticed that when bad things happend, they tend to spiral out until sh*t hit the fan.

Your $1k is a lowball estimate. Better have a spare one ready and waiting for you.

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There is a difference between a machine that is ready to help a client and one that has all my favorite xmonad hot-keys setup.

Now a web-based ssh is enough to do 99% of the work.

But true comfort takes time

> There is a difference between a machine that is ready to help a client and one that has all my favorite xmonad hot-keys setup.

Only if you don't take the few minutes to prepare. I have a Dropbox hosted bash profile that keeps all my favorites synced across machines, there's no reason why your hot-keys couldn't be stored similarly.

(I have a real .profile for each machine, but its first line is `source ~/Dropbox/conf/bash_profile` which lets me override if necessary and apply machine specific instructions.)

Same here (only on github)

My next machine will be Mac or Ubuntu 13.04. (and last time 10.10 -> 12.10 took 1 day).

I don't know about a "few minutes", but spending a couple hours putting together some type of system for automatically installing your system configuration is SO worth it - probably one of the most frustration-saving investments of your time imaginable as a developer, if you haven't done it already.

After years of being frustrated at my configuration being different on every system because I was too lazy to invest a little bit of time into doing something like this, I wrote a small Python script that creates all the config files I use (zshrc, tmux.conf, etc.) - it concatenates the 'generic' piece of each config file with an OS-specific part (for Linux/Mac-specific setup) and a host-specific part (for system-specific setup) and writes the concatenated file to my home directory. There are probably much better solutions out there than rolling your own script to do this, but I like it because I know exactly what it does and how to add features myself when I need them.

Now when I start using a new system, I just do 'git pull' and 'make all'. It's extremely satisfying how with this type of setup, in seconds, a brand new system feels exactly like the ones I've been using for months/years.

> I don't know about a "few minutes", but spending a couple hours putting together some type of system for automatically installing your system configuration is SO worth it - probably one of the most frustration-saving investments of your time imaginable as a developer, if you haven't done it already.

My solution of Dropbox synced config files was the few minute solution, but I'm sure I could be more clever if needed.

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