Easy backup/restore of installed system?

Yes you can use remastersys for that.You can see a complete tutorial here

The best way is always make a seperate /home partition.See the posts below you can find a better and easy way to backup/restore your system.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087

http://www.debianadmin.com/backup-and-restore-your-ubuntu-system-using-sbackup.html

If you are talking about Acronis® True Image(TM) Home, Bear in mind that this product is not just a file backup tool it is also a disk imaging tool which means it can take a one to one snapshot of your disk.

If you want something to run from Ubuntu desktop that can Image your system then look at Partimage here; http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page, an old tutorial here; http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partimage Partimage can be installed from the software center, it supports a wide variety of file systems.

This can be used in conjunction with a simple file backup system as pointed out by others here to effectively replace the Acronis product. If you want a more powerful file backup system, Backuppc may be good, see; http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/info.html#intro, this is available in the Ubuntu repositories as well.

You don't need any software on ubuntu to do a complete system backup. The easiest and more powerful way of backing up can be found here: Howto: Backup and restore your system!. You can backup and restore entire system live or from a live cd. If you have a corrupted MBR then you can use super grub2 disk . Pop the super grub2 disk in, select optical drive boot, and it will show the existing OS's on your hard drive. Boot into ubuntu, and run sudo grub-install /dev/sda. That's it, the easiest way for restoring grub2.