Snapshots seem an ideal tool for the job. It won't replace a full backup system, but as long as the cost of failure (such as you mistyping a command and nuking the disk's partition data or something) is only a few hours of OS reconfiguration rather than losing priceless family photos, it should work. I use btrfs snapshots on my system. When I'm about to do something "risky" (e.g. trying out kde or cosmic) I take a snapshot beforehand. Then when I want to go back, I just restore the snapshot and reboot. For /home, there won't be a lot of OS configuration there, and if it's a burner machine you probably won't have much personalisation done on it. However, if you want to backup configuration there, look into a dotfile manager.