The importance of setting up a dev site locally

[wryfhk22]

Hi all,

I was wondering if everyone could contribute the advantages of having a dev site set up locally on your machine or why you think this is important?

Obviously theres benefits such as speeding up the development process by not having to continually upload files to a live staging environment etc but I was just wondering what styles of development people adopt, does everyone use the local development route or are content making changes, uploading then testing etc?