Instead of using the Nix profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/system to keep track of the current and previous system configurations, use /nix/var/nix/profiles/system-profiles/name. When you use GRUB 2, for every system profile created with this flag, NixOS will create a submenu named “NixOS - Profile 'name'” in GRUB’s boot menu, containing the current and previous configurations of this profile.
For instance, if you want to test a configuration file named test.nix without affecting the default system profile, you would do:
$ nixos-rebuild switch -p test -I nixos-config=./test.nix
The new configuration will appear in the GRUB 2 submenu “NixOS - Profile 'test'”.