And on a company laptop with automagic backups to the cloud of your home directory, what's secure? At a previous company I disabled persistent shell history, and lost count of the number of times this prevented a sensitive password or key from being added to the treasure trove of secrets that are backup archives. (The backup app nominally supported exclusions, but 1) I don't trust the correctness of corporate bloatware, and more importantly 2) I don't trust that IT or an update wouldn't reset those exclusions.)

Now, shell sessions from a bastion host scream (hopefully!) security sensitive to IT. But dumps from company laptop home directories where 99% is crap from sales and management... no way that is going to be treated with proper care, no matter how much customer PII it might contain.

In this day an age, are workstation backups really necessary? I can't think of anything important I do on my work machine that would need it. Maybe a days worth of code edits that haven't been pushed to GitHub.

If its windows and you use weird certs for external interaction like most power pools do, its pretty important, especially thw solutions that spin up a vm in the cloud foe you quickly.

For me personally yes absolutely.

But I'm not much into the whole cloud movement for privacy reasons.

On a company laptop this all sounds like the company's problem, not mine.

The real problem here is you are typing those "sensitive password or key" into termianl. Instead of type it directly, Use `read password` and `mysql -p$password` is the right way. Additionally, most programs can use environment variables directly, so you can even avoid showing them in the command line arguments.

If you entered something in terminal directly, I won't call it sensitive.