I am not sure how to ask or even what to ask. I imagine there might be many ways to accomplish this.
What I want is to be able to restore my linux installation from a USB key.
I am not concerned about backing up my /home directory. I am only concerned with reproducing my software and drivers as they are currently set up now on my computer. To best illustrate my aim, I guess what I want is what live-usb-creator can do: install my set up to hard drive. Is this possible?
I am using fedora 13 with an Eee1000 solid state. My partitioning is thus:
first drive:
/boot
/
second drive:
swap
/home
If I understand you correctly, you want to just be able to backup a working, configured Linux system to an external storage device, so you could restore that backup to your system again? So this backup doesn't need to be bootable in itself, it just needs to be able to be restorable.
If that is correct, then how I would approach this is via partimage. I would boot to a live CD where the partimage program is installed, and backup your / partition as a partimage file. You then store that partimage file on your external storage device.
If, then, at any point you need to revert back to that OS configuration, you can use partimage again to restore the whole / partition.
That is how I would approach this, but others may have better suggestions, which may be better for your particular situation.
Thanks a lot for that strategy.