The Annual Nuking of my Machines
How often is too often to wipe your machine and start fresh?
I had a conversation recently with a colleague around how often we refresh our machines. They seemed surprised to find out that I wipe my machines annually. It's actually more than once a year but I'll always do it around the New Year regardless.
Is this excessive? Maybe, but it takes very little time for me to go through the process and get the machine back to how I like it but without all of the junk I may have accumulated throughout the year.
What I'm looking to leave behind is files and images, virtual environments, packages, and software I no longer use. I could do this managing as I go but stuff inevitably falls through the net.
To get back up to working speed again post refresh, I've a couple of processes to make this as smooth as possible. A Brewfile for my software, dotfiles for that software's configuration. Then any files that I actually need are in cloud storage which I can pull from when needed. If files didn't make it to my cloud storage then they weren't important and would have been wiped also.
It's obviously personal preference how often a tear down happens, some people never do it, and that's fine. For me however that feeling of a fresh machine is too good to give up.