1. There is no shame in dual booting. That will give you the freedom to find alternatives for everything in your workflow until you stop needing to boot into Windows at all. The preferred way is with a separate physical drive, because windows updates will sometimes overwrite the ESP partition or do other weird things which could break your Linux install.

2. Not an expert in that, sorry. There are plenty of articles online for alternatives for all of those.

3. Linux has no trouble reading NTFS. I have an NTFS network drive, and on my dual boot laptop I can simply reach into the NTFS partition on my second drive and grab files from it from Linux (Windows cannot read the Linux drive, though).

4. Not sure on those specific models, but I have a Behringer UM2 and Linux detects and works with it just fine.

I am using lftp and mirror. One server functions as the “main” server, which mirrors the backup server to itself once per day at a specific time (they both run 24/7 so I set it to run very early in the morning when it is unlikely to be accessed).

In my crontab I have:

# # * * * /usr/bin/lftp -e "mirror -eRv [folder path on main server] [folder path on backup server]; quit;" sftp://[user]@[address of backup server]:[port number]

Two old HP thin client PCs configured as 4TB SFTP file servers using vsftpd on Debian. Each one uses software RAID 1 with both an NVMe and SATA SSD internally, and are in two separate locations with a cron job which syncs one to the other every 24 hours.

People who actually know what they are doing will probably find this silly, but I had fun and learned a lot setting it up.