Tvheadend

An incident last night (described in my previous thread) once again makes me wonder why there is apparently no way to back up and restore TVHeadEnd. Let me preface this by saying I am not a Linux geek at all; I'm doing good if I can get an OS like Ubuntu Server and my tuner card's drivers installed. I'm much more comfortable in a GUI than at the command line, but on a server you don't have a desktop, so no GUI other than the TVHeadEnd web interface.

What I would like to be able to do is one of two things:

1) Export all my TVHeadEnd settings to some sort of file that could then be imported by any new version of TVHeadEnd. I've seen a few vague comments about saving the .hts directory but the general consensus seems to be that although you can save you setting in that way, the likelihood of actually restoring them is pretty low. What I'm really looking for is a way to upgrade to a new major version of TVHeadEnd on a newly installed operating system (same hardware, but with the hard drive reformatted and a newer version of the OS installed, followed by a recent version of TVHeadEnd) without having to re-enter all my setting manually.

OR:

2) At regular intervals save a "snapshot" of my system to some kind of file that you can boot from, and restore that previous snapshot. So if you system is working now and then later on you manage to screw it up, you can go back to the most recent snapshot and work forward from there. I have found plenty of programs that will do something like this if you have a GUI (a few are shown at http://www.nuxified.org/blog/easy-linux-backup-software-time-machine-functionality), but nothing that seems to work if you only have a command line available. And remember, the goal is to have a file that even a dummy like me can use for restoration - it does me absolutely no good to simply back up the entire directory structure if restoration isn't a piece of cake. I know there are a lot of command line based copy programs of various types but all they do is give you copies of files (and sometimes they don't even handle symlinks properly), and that does me no good at all because you can't do a quick reinstall from a bunch of files. I know on a Raspberry Pi there are ways to backup the entire SD card, but I have a 1 TB hard drive so that's a bit different.

Are there any good, relatively EASY solutions for either of these scenarios? I think I may have asked this a year or two ago and there was nothing then (a few suggestions to use system tools like rsync but then how do you do the quick restore? Not that I would have the foggiest clue how to use it anyway) so I'm just wondering if anything has changed since then. #1 would be my preferred option because it would make upgrading the OS and TVHeadEnd so much easier, but if there's any export/import options in TVHeadEnd I'm not seeing them.