i have not backed up anything with the other tools yet and i would want to back up the entire system drive so i can basically, well restore the drive to the state it was backed up in
system drive is ext4
the intended drive to backup to is exfat
nothing encrypted as far as im aware, at least nothing intentionally
The questions I asked are independent from the tool you use.
How do you intend to restore the backup if your system is broken? Thatâs the reason why I recommended Clonezilla. You can easily just copy the backup from the destination drive back to the working medium.
I guess youâre aiming for something like snapper snapshots which can be restored to whatever point is available in itâs history.
Backing up the whole system while running isnât a problem (only read access required). Youâll get in trouble if you want to restore the backup using the running system (mounted partitions).
im kinda lost.
i intend to restore the backup with the same tool used in a liveusb.
while clonezilla seems to be a good tool for it, i am hesitant to use a seemingly advanced tool like it, it feels easy to mess up and id like to be safe with what im doing since its about my system drive.
so if i have to restore the system for one reason or another it would most likely be from a liveusb so it doesnt really matter if the drive is mounted or not.
everything past âbackup drive a to drive b, restore back from drive b to drive aâ feels to me like i can too easily mess it up, while i dont mind trouble shooting too much i would like to avoid it with the system drive.
No surprise. It is anything but trivial. Correct backups are close to rocket science.
For your purpose thatâs the right way to go and much easier to understand. You need to find a live distro/medium which has the required tool installed. Then you can exactly do that
i used gnome-disk-utility many times to create an .img file (-> full disk clone/copy) of a partition or the entire disk. And i restored it as well many times. Always used a live cd/usb which comes with gnome-disk-utility already (like fedora, ubuntuâŚyou name it) you could even use the EnOS install media. Sure, it comes with XFCE and there is no gnome-disk-utility, but you can easily install it in the live environment - no problem
gnome-disk-utility is really easy peasy 
1+ for borg and borgmatic
small update, it indeed worked like a charm and nothing additional was needed, thank you for giving me additional reassurance, im a serious worrywart sometimes.
I have 2 go to ways to do this. The first one is to use dd which you can save a whole drive as an image with. My second is to flash a USB drive with clonezilla and use clonezilla to clone a drive as an image on a different drive and you can restore it using clonezilla. When I replaced my third gen NVME SSD for a fourth gen I used clonezilla to clone my drive to an external HDD. I then removed it and put the other one in and restored it. I had both Endeavour and Windows on it. Both OS worked as before and Windows did not even deactivate itself. For digital forensics, dd is the way to go to make images out of those USBs and drives.
maybe itâs better that way, than being the opposite 
nice to hear/read
All I can say is that I have used Timeshift for YEARS, and have performed countless backups/restores of my system, all without fail. Regardless if it wasnât originally designed that way or not, it works and it is easy to use.
It is easy to do as long as you follow a couple of rules;
Timeshift and Clonezilla are two very different approaches. Timeshift is undoubtedly very good for backing up files in your /home. Itâs not designed to make a backup of the complete disc/partition (including your OS). In addition to that Clonezilla even copies the bootloader of the disc.