[qwery]

> i want to mess up with wine, now I just backup ~/.wine, do whatever, restore.

You can set WINEPREFIX to use a non-default prefix path (other than `~/.wine`).

Note that the prefix doesn't contain everything that wine spills all over your home. It adds (XDG `.desktop`) launchers & menu/desktop shortcuts, file type associations, icons, etc. to the usual locations.

[ajsnigrutin]

Usually I need to upgrade something within a wine environment, and sometimes the new version of whatever software doesn't work, so "cp -r .wine .wine-bak", do whatever, fail, rm, cp back, and it's done.