Hi.

A little introduction first. I'm very new to all this and have a tendency to jump into things without looking very hard - I find I learn from mistakes more quickly this way - and with this in mind I began to look into ways of creating windows-style restore points.

I came across a thread here -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087 which basically puts everything on the hdd into a big tar file which can then be used to overwrite changes made afterwards - in a sense it creates a restore point.

Anyway, my question is this - is it really this simple or am I being totally naive?

Welcome - erm, it really is this simple

Linux/Unix, unlike Windows, can be completely tar'd up and if you break the OS, extracted back over where it was. There are caveats however, boot sectors and what not, but the general lump can be just the tar file.