From Howto forge

When reading a 'hint' on the website of LinuxFromScratch I discovered the special capabilities of unionfs, specially in combination with chroot. Later I read a HowTo on a wikiwebsite of Gentoo, about entering a chrooted homedirectory when using a special script as shell. Combining these two brings me to using a chrooted environment, which you enter when logging in as a special user. This environment is a exact copy (mirror) of the system you're working on. Because you're in safe copy of the real system, you can do whatever you like, it will never change the system, everything stays inside the cache (the readwrite branch).

Read the full thing at http://www.howtoforge.com/safe_mirror_unionfs_chroot