Something about source/version control that's become the gold standard. There really is no other alternative in practice right now. We still have backups, but backups are sweeping, you never want to have to restore from a backup. This is so much so that RedHat has been on a rampage and made btrfs the default filesystem for 43+ installs, and it's frowned upon if you don't use it (some distros won't install without btrfs). They want to move to an appliance-like distro. Again further separating config from data. Making config versioned, immutable and executable, while data is read-write only conceptually.