What I was referring to was not the OS reload, but the reinstallation of Quark and Xtags and Xdata plugins, Creative Suite, Gimp, Ghostscript, MSoffice with netframe addition, some Excel plugins, a Java 5250 terminal immulator, Grep, Gnumeric, PDFtk, Bluefish (and more) and updating the OS. All of that is a genuine pain to get working again.
When I used that PC, I used every tool in the tool box to get the workflow done. A mixture of open source and closed source apps. The workflow process was a total hack.
I created a 3,000 page print catalog, the distributor seasonal promotion books (some were close to 1,000 pages), monthly specials, maintained the descriptions in the AS400 database and created the images for both print an the web for 37,000 items. (I took them to the web for the first time by extracting the image to item (sku) data after opening the print .pdf document and using Grep to extract the intelligence. And did the same thing for the item level sequencing for repeat of the catalog sections.)
Right, neither was I. In fact I would have been stupid to do so. Imaging the machine after just the OS install would be pointless as a restore wouldn't be any quicker than just starting from scratch and reinstalling the OS. I said to back it up after you got your apps installed, which addressed your original complaint.