Yes, that is my approach too. I don't see the point in backing up the OS, when it can easily be reinstalled. Of course, customisations are saved, but not much else.

For the family fileshare, with photos, documents, etc., I use rsnapshot. It is a set of scripts which uses rsync to do proper, versioned backups. I've set it to do daily, weekly, monthly and annual backups. The version of "that file from last week before I made the changes" is still there.

I don't use compression at any point. Storage is cheap.

Just to let you know ( and for anyone reading ), after a day and night figthing I probably have found the problem.
I've done an rsync, just to be sure I had all the relevant files, and then I've upgraded dump binary from a very old dump-0.4b39 to a newer one dump-0.4b46
The first dump has gone well, and I've been able to restore some files that where not corrupted.

Really strage I had the old one, as in every other slackware machine I have aroung there is a newer version and also I'm sure I've used this (old) one when passing from the previous machine to this new one.
Probably the real difference lies in some really big files that wheren't present in the first move, or, more likely, in a very high number of inodes and small files that are now present on this one ( I moved a mail server from a solaris machine to this slackware with 25gb of mail imap files )
Should give Changelog (from dump) a really good read to find some eventually problems tied to one of this two things.

Now back on topic: rsync and rsnapshot seems a very promising way to get versioning of files ( backups ) in case needed, but restoring a dumped filesystem can get you back in less han an hour if you have a catastrophic crash, without never thinking of what was installed and how it was configured.
When the machine is a production one and you need to be up and running in a very small amount of time, my experience says that's the way.

Any way, I will finish my tests ( I mean I will create a new machine from this very last dump ) and let you know the results but a big thanks to everyone made his suggestions.
I've learned a lot.

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And yes, I've also probably find the problem with the garbled dump: in 0.4b41 it has been added the support for ext4 ( which I'm on now )
Previously I've always used ext3, so my dumps were fine.
In this machine I decided to go with ext4 so the restore from a previous ext3 backup was fine but a dump was not.
At least this seems to be the most plausible cause to my problem.

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BTW I'm now studing rsnapshot as, together with a level 0 dump seems a great improvement to my backup strategies
Kudos to those who informed me on this !

@Pigi_102. That be me. As I said in my post I have been using rsnapshot for years. At one time I was remotely backing up my sons computer via ssh, he have moved out, so he is on his own.

I have daily, weekly, and monthly backups setup via cronjobs. I have rsnapshot configured to do 7 dailies, 4 weeklies, 3 monthlies. If you would like I can post my configuration as an example (cron setup, rsnapshot.conf and an exception list).

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