well most our stuff is in "the cloud" so really if we wiped everything, it be just a matter of pulling backups and go. Setting up a backup remote for something so simple of merge vs rebase sounds off to me.
So it sounds like you don't have to push your code since your workstation is already being backed up then? We agree that you don't need to push your feature branches in that situation? I'm not sure, I feel like you just pulled some weird conversational jiu-jitsu where all of a sudden you're making my point back to me.
no our things like documents, database backups, emails, and source code all exist in the cloud. By suggesting my employees all push to remote daily, theres no risk of ever losing anything. All it takes one stolen laptop, one hardware failure to push you back xxx days, from your private branch. I don't know how long you work on a private branch but I have seen people wait close to two weeks during a 2 week sprint.
The Git system we use at my workplace has a private "backup" remote for each employee and a public "share" remote for each employee. So there's no problem rebasing all the time even if you push to the backup remote because it's not shared. Ultimately backups should be a totally separate concern from version control workflow anyway, even if you use Git remotes to back up your work.
