Among the many tools out there for cloning drives and performing full-system backups, one came to my attention for being both free (and open source) and powerful: Clonezilla, a product of the Free ...
A 2TB Evo Plus is enroute to replace the existing 500GB version of the same M.2 drive in my system, and I have two M.2 slots on the mobo, one currently occupied by the OS drive and the other empty.