What I did in windows was create images of my drive and restore them.

in linux I am running

and this creates a folder for me with all my files, and apparently saves meta data like permissions and paths...

Since I'm using arch and things break sometimes,I'm booted into a CLI with errors and cannot figure my way out since I'm a noob... would I be able to just delete my entire root and replace it with the rsync backup without a problem?

Your backup method seems a bit odd.. Do you still have the images you made of your Linux installation, or was it an image of your whole device?

For backups, I usually recommend writing a BASH script which can be automated by the cron service. In plain English that means: write a BASH script which locates and copies your /home directory and edited configuration files (not all of /etc, just .conf files I may have changed) to a "Backup" folder. Compress with tar, saving permissions with the "-p" flag at least. It must be created with root and extracted by root, as a user cannot change permissions above him/herself.

The script should then remove the files copied and store, move or upload your compressed backup to wherever you want. Using BASH and various ftp software, you can automate a secure uploaded backup to a remote server, and have it check for old versions older than 1 week, 2 weeks, etc for deletion. Other options are to have the script check to see if your backup drive is plugged in around 12am-4am every 30-45 minutes using hardware ID or mountpoint (latter works but is sloppy) and mirror/move backups to drive.

For a seamless recovery, a script can be included in your backup to backup config files, move in ones from backup and copy over /home directory. It could then run "adduser" to recreate your account and subsequently change permissions/ownership of user directories back to "you".

You seem to have tried to exclude an awful lot, why?
Gfl (ghost for linux) will create an image that you can overwrite a drive with, probably a partition, I've never used it.
Rsync does incremental backups. On restore it (as I understand it) puts back what is missing but will not correct damaged files. I use rsync to backup data and restore just that data to the new/repaired system.

Fred.

Seems definitive enough.
Short answer - yep, looks like it should work. Might toss up a few curly issues (PID files, boot loader) but seems reasonable. Not much different to taking a snapshot and rolling back - just a lot more effort ...
(well not quite the same - rsync only does disk-resident files. It has no knowledge of what's cached in memory).