&gt; Even with Time Machine backups, you still spend many hours setting configs after a restore.<p>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?<p>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&#x27;t pay dividends. Of course, there&#x27;s the issue of offsite backups, which typically aren&#x27;t as comprehensive as TimeMachine.<p>The point I&#x27;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&#x27;s not as high a priority, because you&#x27;re mitigating a future time investment with a current time investment. You have to weigh the two against each other: time spent today versus <i>potentially</i> time spent in the future.