System Restore

[postmast3r]

On 6/25/05, janrinok <ulist at gs1.ubuntuforums.org> wrote:
> 
> I may be missing the point here - but if I am then someone will quickly
> point it out I'm sure.!  The original post raised a valid question -
> how to restore to a previously working system.  There is IMHO no point
> in backing up all of the system software - the latest versions are
> always available online, and you have a full working version from your
> original disk (I assume!).  However, what is required is a copy of the
> 'home' directories and the 'etc' directory.  All the rest seems to be
> updated when the recovery takes place.  There _are_ GUI interfaces for
> this, of sorts.  For example, in kubuntu, simply right click on the
> appropriate directory and select Compress/Add to Archive.  Burn the
> resulting tar.gz (or whatever compression you prefer) to a CD and you
> have your permanent snapshot of the appropriate directory.  To restore,
> do it all from the original disks and/or online, and then restore the
> contents of the your CD back to the original locations.  This seems to
> meet what was required.  After all, if you have just installed package
> 'x' and it screws your system up, uninstall it again.  But I'm just a
> simple guy, and this works for me.  Jan

For some packages, it isn't that easy.  Think of what would happen if
someone installed nvidia's drivers (without fully reading the
documentation) and can no longer start X after logging out of gnome
ever since the driver was installed.  If this user has no clue on how
to use the shell, they would be unable to use their system at all and
would have no clue how to get X to load again.  They also might not
know how to uninstall nvidia's driver and get their system back to the
state it was before the nvidia driver was installed.  However, if some
sort of "System Restore"-like utility was available, with an option in
grub's menu to "restore to a previously working state" or something,
this user could be back in a GUI in Linux in just a few minutes. 
Whereas, a complete reinstall of linux may take anywhere from half an
hour to several hours and restoring their data (if they even had a
backup) might take just as long.