What kind of back up should I make to prevent against this...?

A while back I messed up my phone by trying to make the notification bar black without being deodexed and ended up having to restore via SBF. When I got it back up and running, the big problem I had was - I'd get everything set up, rooted and all apps installed the way I wanted them, go to restart (for any number of reasons) and when it booted back up, I had maybe 1-2 minutes before it rebooted again and looped that way until I'd do a factory reset from recovery mode.

On my most recent factory reset, I did something I hadn't before. After doing the factory reset and letting it boot up, going through the initial setup and all that, I booted into recovery mode and wiped the cache. I actually did this before the factory reset too, but that's beside the point. So my question is.. with this set up perfectly the way I want it now, how do I save it/back it up so that SHOULD I go back into one of those boot cycles, I can restore it? Is there an app that can be easily accessed in the 1-2 minutes I'd have before a reboot that can do a system restore to this exact build at this moment in time? (also, could those cache wipes be the reason I'm not having problems with boot loops now?)

I just want to edit the build.prop file. On the first, unSBF'd phone I had, before it got messed up in the notification bar ordeal, I could edit the build.prop file with zero care in the world. But then after SBFing and the last few setups that would reboot into a boot cycle, when I'd edit the build.prop file, it'd send it into that boot cycle. That SEEMED to be the catalyst. I want to change a few settings, like the heap size and max events. Can I do this (safely) through JRummy's Droid X/2 Overclocker app? I know that edits the build.prop file, but I used to use Root Explorer before and for whatever reason, that SEEMED to be what messed things up, and I don't want to do yet another factory reset.

TL;DR - how can I create a restore "image" that I can access quickly before I run into a 2 minute load-then-reboot-again cycle that would fix that cycle AND is editing the build.prop file for heap size & max events through JRummy's overclocker app be a safe way to edit that file?