yeah it’s pretty easy to just reinstall linux- but i do have a lot of customizations and non software mgr programs i have to manually install that take me a couple of hours to install and tweak to my liking-
I was able to do a ‘current system live CD’ backup which was quite nice- Will save me a lot of work and customization work-
Would be nice if there was a way to do a complete disk backup of the dual boot disk- as i have loads of windows customizations and tweaks too0- and that one takes me days to do-
Check out youtube for some videos on systemback- I think you’ll like it-
I started working with computers on HP-3000 minicomputers. I really loved the way they did backups on those systems. You did backup to tape (1200 BPI reels!). The backup program actually loaded all the boot and configuration information at the start of the first tape. To do a system reload, you booted off the tape, and told it to restore. No other media was required. Unfortunately, this was the only way to defrag a disk, or to level data out if you configured a new disk pack. Fortunately I didn't have to do that often, but I've always wanted a way to do something similar on my PC. On my HP-3000s, I had an average of 20 or so tapes per system, which was time consuming, but absolutely solid from a data restoration standpoint.
If I had a blueray writer (haven't made that jump yet), I'd probably have about the same amount of media. I know I could essentially do a 'dd' to get system images, but that is rather impractical on a day to day basis.
These days, I do my best to keep a list of every program I install that's in addition to the base load, so it's a matter of executing a script to get the programs back, but I still have to look to my backups for deltas of stuff in /etc that I've modified. Backintime does a great job of backing up user data though. Restoring all of /home is painless, and I end up with my desktop exactly the way I had it before the restore. That's one of the really cool things about unix in general IMO. I've never had a successful restore on a windows system anywhere close to the degree I get, because so much stuff is hidden in the registry, and doing registry restores is problematic at best.