Complete backup of Arch configurations & apps

Question

Can anyone recommend an easy way to backup my Arch install?  I have tried using Arch as my desktop several times over the past couple of years and it always goes like this:
1) Install and configure Arch
2) Do something silly and break it.
3) Reinstall Arch
I would like to save everything needed to completely restore my system on a regular basis to a network share to prevent having to reconfigure it all the time.
Thanks!

Answer 1

here's a copy of my backup script in /etc/cron.daily which shows how I used tar and dirsync.
#!/bin/bash
[ ! -d /mnt/hdb5/backup ] && mkdir -p /mnt/hdb5/backup
cd /mnt/hdb5/backup
pacman -Q | cut -d' ' -f1 | paste -s | sed 's|s| |g' > filelist
#tar -czvf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/home/pkgs --exclude=/home/tyler/.ccache /etc /home
backup_file="/var/log/backup.log"
dirsync /etc /mnt/hdb5/backup/etc -l $backup_file
dirsync /home/tyler /mnt/hdb5/backup/tyler -X .ccache -l $backup_file
dirsync /web /mnt/hdb5/backup/web -l $backup_file