I have a different policy of transience and that's not to use my work computer to store anything important. If it's important it should be where I can find it if my laptop takes a spill down the stairs, or by others if I win the lottery and don't show up to work one day.
I was already working toward this policy when I worked at a place where an entire batch of computers came with defective hard drives that died between 24 and 30 months of first power-on. We had 6 people rebuilding their dev environments from scratch in about a 4 month period. By the time mine died more than half the setup time was just initializing whole disk encryption. Everything else was in version control or the wiki, with turn-by-turn instructions that had been tested four times already.
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I have a different policy of transience and that's not to use my work computer to store anything important. If it's important it should be where I can find it if my laptop takes a spill down the stairs, or by others if I win the lottery and don't show up to work one day.
I was already working toward this policy when I worked at a place where an entire batch of computers came with defective hard drives that died between 24 and 30 months of first power-on. We had 6 people rebuilding their dev environments from scratch in about a 4 month period. By the time mine died more than half the setup time was just initializing whole disk encryption. Everything else was in version control or the wiki, with turn-by-turn instructions that had been tested four times already.