Text Widgets don’t move with site – where are they stored?

So I either dev locally or dev on a subdomain and when moving a site to launch…. text widgets always disappear. Are they not stored in the database? I always do a dump and import or the database never moves… just when the file system changes the text widgets don’t seem to stay there. All other widgets do it’s just the text widgets…

Where do text widgets store the info?
And How can I prevent that in the future?

thx