One in a while my laptop crashes/dies because of a bad/empty battery, crappy wifi driver or whatever other reason.

For a while I've wondered if it's possible to force Linux to periodically save the state (like vmware snapshots) to disk so you can restore from that with possibly slightly outdated work but at least with all of your apps open in the same state you've left them.

I don't really see the point in having to boot everything from cratch constantly, although KDE saves your state on logout, that doesn't happen periodically (by default) either. It would make it much nicer to recover from your crashes if your ram was written to disk periodically.

Anyone know if there's a system call to do this without also shutting down the machine? Even a manual button to save the entire state would be nice.