Over the span of the last couple months I have gone through more phones than most would go through in two years. Motorola Triumph to a Dell Streak to S3 back to Dell then back to the S3.
I believed in the cloud and my contacts and basic settings would transfer. I screen shot my texts, apps, and settings so I can take it over. My email settings tend to be a bit weird - Exchange for Hotmail and IMAP for Yahoo so I note those down too.
One thing that I like to do is backup my text messages and screen shot the active chats.
With each cycle I only kept the active chats. Now I have filtered everything down to a few semi-active chats and you know what? I was right, I don't need to go exert the effort to start chats. The ones where I did before are bound to dry up and it would make me try to bring it back but there was no point and it isn't my fault. :)