Widget recovery after re-activation!

With every plugin that you try which fails a fundamental part of the resolution is to deactivate all plugins to ensure that they are not causing a conflict and to isolate the one this is.

However this is a pain in the proverbial if you have widgets in use that are components of any of those plugins deactivated as they immediately get removed from the widget areas, and do not return when you reactivate the plugin post troubleshooting.

Does anybody know of any plugin to persist widget data or other best practice to reduce the weight of this problem?

Of course I can make notes of all settings for any widget that is going to be deactivated but this requires a methodological approach and ability to remember to do so that I just don’t own.