Comment by ajross

> 1) They're actually worth preserving, and not some experimental garbage that ended up being totally pointless.

That seems naive. You don't know what's pointless for years, usually. Can I tell you how many times I've gone back to stale pull requests and topic branches to recover "How did I do this?" code?

> 2) I need to get them off of my local machine for disaster-recovery purposes.

That's called a "backup", and yes, data robustness is a big advantage of this workflow. You're acting like this is some kind of rare event. I push my local work to a branch (or three) on github every hour!

A corrolary is hardware independence, btw. Working off remote branches means I can also stand up a replacement development environment with a simple clone. (And the corrolary to that means that I can trivially document this such that other people can stand up development environments for my stuff, too!)