I just got a new laptop (a long story that I will document some day), and I had to transfer my account over from the old one. I used rsync to do it, and everything works just as I had it. I know that this is how it works, but little things like this make me realize how cool this tech is. I am glad I do the work I do. ^_^
Since you’re not following the pumps 
recent post by Webber aligned with this, but uses ease of moving stuff to a new desktop to ask why moving stuff to a new web host is hard Why is it hard to move from one machine to another? An analysis. [x-post from Userops] -- DustyCloud Brainstorms
But I note that moving stuff to a new desktop is only easy in the case of a clean break, and only using one machine at a time, and sticking with the same set of applications. I can totally understand why people and organizations want to chuck as much of the problem as possible to ‘the cloud’, even the tiny fraction that has ever heard of rsync. The rest? Hahahhahahahaa…
Funny you should mention that post, because it helped me out (and while I don’t pump, I do, um… RSS as a verb).
I actually disagree with a lot of what Chris says in there, or I don’t understand the issue at eir level. Our disagreements have always been about practicality, me thinks. While Chris is trying to fix how applications are deployed, millions of people are using Docker and no longer caring about their software and instead are using it for something interesting, and I think that is unsaid in eir critiques. It is possible that as a general web user, I am not the target audience for Chris’s blog.
Anyhow, long story short, Dell replaced my XPS 13 with an M3800, which is a bigger, more powerful GNU/Linux machine, and I’ve been so busy this week that I haven’t had time to set it up. I normally do a clean break, because in the past I’ve gotten weird behavior, and sometimes I install cruft that I don’t use and want to break away from those config files.
Well, I decided that just keeping configs around was fine, and I would install just the software I use, and it ended up working really well. I rsynced my home directory to an external drive using a specific ignorelist, and then rsynced that onto the new machine. It was ~24GB, and took about 10 minutes total to be up and running on the new lappy.
My software list these days is really small and documented. I had wanted to add the GNOME extensions I use to that page, but those were actually carried over in my home directory! I was able to replicate my environment really quickly.
All that said, I am also one of those people that prefers to have everything in the cloud. If I lose my computer, I can rebuild it fairly quickly. There are a handful of dot files I am not tracking, but I basically have them memorized. Everything else is living somewhere else… which reminds me, I need to move the repo site elsewhere by the end of the month! Proof the non-silo’d life is just as transient as anything else in life!