Most of my core work is safely in source control and a fair bit of the rest is in various shared places, but Windows (or any OS, really) does require that a lot of basic configuration be stored, cryptically where you'll never find it all on your own, locally -- config files can be copied if you find them, but registry entries and wherever else Windows (in my case) stores settings, not so much. That's the stuff that makes migrating to a new machine painful for me. Software installation is mostly straightforward; I save all my installers and if I know a migration is coming I can take inventory as well. The rest is what's hard, especially if there's an OS change (where did Windows hide this setting this time???). I also have a bit of a bootstrapping problem; I need to find the accessibility settings early in order to be able to manage the rest.
I don't necessarily hate change, but I see no reason to disrupt something that's working just fine. I never upgraded my home machine to High Sierra (early security concerns), let alone Mojave. Eventually I'll have to, but I'm in no hurry. When my first work laptop died (power supply, but for that they shipped a whole new laptop, not just the part), the new one was the same model so I decided to save a ton of work by moving the hard drive. Much better! That won't work next time; I don't want four-year-old hardware. :-)
no subject
Most of my core work is safely in source control and a fair bit of the rest is in various shared places, but Windows (or any OS, really) does require that a lot of basic configuration be stored, cryptically where you'll never find it all on your own, locally -- config files can be copied if you find them, but registry entries and wherever else Windows (in my case) stores settings, not so much. That's the stuff that makes migrating to a new machine painful for me. Software installation is mostly straightforward; I save all my installers and if I know a migration is coming I can take inventory as well. The rest is what's hard, especially if there's an OS change (where did Windows hide this setting this time???). I also have a bit of a bootstrapping problem; I need to find the accessibility settings early in order to be able to manage the rest.
I don't necessarily hate change, but I see no reason to disrupt something that's working just fine. I never upgraded my home machine to High Sierra (early security concerns), let alone Mojave. Eventually I'll have to, but I'm in no hurry. When my first work laptop died (power supply, but for that they shipped a whole new laptop, not just the part), the new one was the same model so I decided to save a ton of work by moving the hard drive. Much better! That won't work next time; I don't want four-year-old hardware. :-)