Definitely not for the light-hearted, but if OP is willing to take a month or so to learn Nixlang it actually gets quite easy and you can do pretty much everything with it. No need for Timeshift either. You’d have to really work at breaking it and once its set up that’s it.

Not to mention if you upgrade your system/SSD you only need a few key nix files and some dotfiles to basically clone your whole setup, especially if you use home-manager