Creating and restoring snapshots

Although Mint comes with a standard handy backup tool, there are no built-in snapshot tools that use a graphical interface. This is actually fine, as there are many solutions available for snapshotting a system; one of which is discussed here.

So what are snapshots and backups? A backup is a collection of your important files, while a snapshot is a backup of your entire machine, from the top to bottom. Snapshots are often referred to as images. The idea is that you can save a backup of your entire machine, right down to your configuration files. When restoring a snapshot, your machine will look and act exactly as it did at the point the snapshot was taken, because it literally is a clone of the machine at that point in time.

There are various ways of performing snapshots in Linux, and the method detailed in this section isn't even exclusive to Mint. One of the many benefits of Linux is that very little is hidden from you, to the point where you could...