Go out and buy an external USB drive, and backup your files to it manually.
Say that again
In the past I’ve tried to BU manually but really want an automatic system of some sort.
I am not sure whether it works with Mac, but I have been using CloneGenius (beta version) for a couple of years now.
It backs up the entire OS partition.
It is much faster than trying to reinstall everything. A 30gb partition takes about 40 minutes to back up (non-compressed). Reinstall, if necessary, also takes about 40 minutes.
CG operates from the CD drive, with its own OS. It reads USB external drives, so it is easy to direct the backed up files to write to USB drives.
USB drives are dirt cheap. I picked up one 320gb Western Digital this week at Walmart for $79.xx