That's why I have public dotfiles. Also this situation happens rarely. The whole beauty of software is that you can customize it and make it your own.
The only downside I see with customization is that it can be huge timesink.
I guess to each his own, but I think you're really missing out.
P. S. Backups.
Regardless of the frequency of such a situation, it can really bite you when something big breaks and you need to ssh into a vanilla server in the middle of the night under pressure. Trying to fix a production fire under the gaze of an angry CEO is stressful enough, but not being able to take care of business on a box because of a missing personal config is truly one of the worst experiences I've ever had in this business.
It's only happened to me once, but that one experience made me take a really hard look at my workflow, and years later, I have no regrets about scaling back my configs. I guess it really just depends on your job and on-call/firefighting responsibilities.
Keep your dot files in github. Grab them. No internet, I bet you have them on your laptop that you are ssh'd to the server from. SCP them over. Heck, cut and paste them if needed. If things are so bad nether of these work you have bigger issues and need to consider a design with some redundancy. Clos fabrics and VM/containers and if you have to have bare metal then you should have more then one (cluster or behind a SLB).
There is no excuse for a single point of failure in 2017. Not trying to sound like an ass but....
You did say it was years ago, so what I said seems to be true for today, no judgment on your situation years ago. My first major shit, got to fix it was on Solaris 2.51 so that shows my age.
I bind bash and tmux to vim keymaps. If that is not on the box it is the first thing I fix. I will be fast to resolve the issue if my fingers just work as I have trained them :)
This works fine if your configuration contains nothing too custom. Typically after copying my dotfiles I have to edit them quite substantially to make them actually work - mainly because they rely on outside sources (in .tmux.conf, stuff like `set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l bash"`, in .vimrc it's usually colours, clipboard hacks etc that break). Maybe I should have a second, trimmed down version with no outside dependencies.