I recommend the free Linux program rsync with it's GUI grsyncĮasy to use, can run via crontab at your selected times, backs up to external drives as required.
GRSYNC WINDOWS 10 PRO
If you have W10 pro you could try HYPER-V as well but I'd advise against setting up Linux VM's with HYPER-V until you have a bit more experience with Linux systems).Įven with NAS systems you need to backup from time to time (I'm using QEMU/KVM but Virtual box and Vmware player - both free can be used to set up Virtual machines on a Linux system - and Virtual Box / Vmware player also work on Windows. Here's a recent W10 build running as a Virtual machine on this NAS. With a VM if things go wrong just delete the VM and start again - no dmage done or data lost on your main Host.
If you don't have Linux experience then why not create a Virtual machine to get used to it - there's a load of good distros for beginners - some of them are even "More Windows than Windows" !!!!.
Other benefits - automatic backups (rsync / grsync scheduled when you want via crontab), you can add software at will - and also you can remotely access and control from say a Windows laptop via SSH. Here's my HDD config on a NAS box (running Arch Linux with KDE as the GUI) In fact there's so many advantages in using a Linux box as a NAS I'm surprised people are still messing around with Windows for this type of thing (Home computers - of course W2K16 and W2K19 commercial Windows servers are fine too but they aren't normally in the price range for people who just want Home Networks whereas Linux is 100% free !!. No prob with windows read / write of ntfs file system either.
GRSYNC WINDOWS 10 INSTALL
The great thing about any sort of Linux distro to be used as a server is that you can use really old hardware if you need to, networking always works straight out of the box - even on wifi these days (that used to be a bugbear), you can run the server totally headless (although you can install any GUI you want as well), it's a multi-user system so you don't need to be logged on at all to have the server running 24/7, you can aggregate loads of old HDD's of different sizes to software RAID 0 configuration - you don't need equal size HDD's so you can use the whole storage of your HDD's, and streaming multimedia works perfectly.
For a Server I'd (but of course I am biased) go for any sensible Linux distro.