Apart from dd you can also go for Clonezilla or Rescuezilla. Both not super user friendly but once you get familiar with it makes backups and restore easy and fast for data and boot-loader.

https://forum.aux.computer/t/the-future-of-nixcpp-lix/483

The announcement resolves one of my last fears for Aux: development on Nix itself. It is no secret that the number of people knowledgeable about the project and are willing to work on this CPP codebase is small. You have probably seen me mention multiple times by now that @sig_cli needs all of the help that we can get. Lix resolves this entirely with a trusted team of experts. This means that Aux is now able to remove Nix development from our priorities and can instead collaborate with Lix moving forward.

Nice news. DSL is back.

If you like NixOS for its packages, you can install a Systemd free OS, and then add Nix package manager. For example Nix-bin is packaged for Debian and the Systemd free Devuan : https://pkginfo.devuan.org/cgi-bin/policy-query.html?c=package&q=nix-bin&x=submit Here is a very old howto for Void Linux, but maybe still works : https://voidlinux.org/news/2014/01/Using-the-Nix-package-manager.html