One of the simplest ways to safeguard against breakage is to have your /home on a separate partition. I realised I wouldn't need to backup and reformat it from the beginning, I just need to wipe the root drive and reinstall again.
It's made even easier by writing an installation script. Simply put, you can pipe a list of packages into packstrap and use a little convenience package for pulling a partition scheme out of a file.
I like to tinker and I'm aware that things will break so I have these tools that let me rebuild the system again in as short a time as possible.