Me too! I use Clonezilla for backup. It is standalone, a bit of a pain in the ass to learn, but very reliable. And it lets me backup just the EFI and OS partition.
The documentation says it is a backup and it uses rsync for a backup / snapshot. I use Timeshift and recommend it. It has come in handy a few times for me.
There is a large discussion on Timeshift on this forum at ;