I have to ship my laptop in for repairs, and they warn that my HD might come back empty. What's the easiest way for me to back up my entire HD (which is encrypted, I might add) to a USB stick or some other external drive, and then how do I later restore everything?
I don't necessarily need a bootable exact clone. I just don't want to reinstall all the packages and modify system-level config files again.
Other answers on this site may not apply, since we're talking about a fully encrypted HD.