Well, I'm putting this here instead of security, because it's more a question of strategy than about encryption.

I want to use an encrypted LVM with a LUKS password. I know virtually nothing about this, but I can look it up, I've only tried it with the install option when you're installing K/Ubuntu though and on Debian Etch, though. I have two Kubuntu systems that I really want to preserve a lot of customized aspects of, but that I also want to encrypt. I'm trying to think of a good way of doing this.

I want to be able to clone the entire system, and I'm not exactly sure how I could do that either with a clean install being overwritten by the old install, or somehow setting up an encrypted disk and then just cloning the old system onto the partition. I think there's a few nuances of LVM that I don't understand either that pertain to booting. I have backups of /etc/, which would cover the configurations, but I'm not sure if that's really all I'll need. It would be really nice if there was an easy way of making a list of which packages and programs I had installed to help out, after all having configuration files for programs that I forgot I was even using due to their unobtrusive nature doesn't really help too much; in the end some of these applications are such a install-and-forget thing, all I would need to do is install them again to have the same configuration, like BIND for example for my network's DNS. I thought about maybe compiling a list from /usr/share/doc, but it dawned on me not all applications install their documentation there. Binary directories don't really help because not all of the binaries have terribly descriptive names. Perhaps manual files would be a better way to compile a list of packages installed?

Anyway, I'm hoping that someone has personal experience in something similar or knows of any articles, guides, or tutorials pertaining to it. I haven't really found anything but quick tutorials that don't really discuss all of the subtleties I mentioned.