I understand where you are coming from but I would take the opposite, namely not how quickly and conveniently you get back to exactly the same state (because that’s actually really hard) but rather how quickly and conveniently you can get to work, or play, or do whatever you do, from the most generic of hardware and software, including of course yours. What this perspective suggests though is NOT to consider your stuff precious but on the contrary, to assume it will inevitably disappear, due to any reason, from a freak event, e.g stolen to the mundane, e.g. hardware failure over time. IMHO it’s much more relaxing to consider hardware disposable. My own heuristic for this is to understand what a distribution does, save only MY data (e.g. things that I produce, for example in a data it would be my saves but not the game itself) and buy only well supported hardware.