You had me in the first half, not gonna lie 🫡😂💀

I put Linux mint on it, cinnamon mode!

I just put GNU/Linux on a Celeron II 4 core single threaded CPU. It’s running along fine. I didn’t even have a use case, but just felt bad to let the old technology go to waste. This was within the last two weeks.

I always use this command as $rm -fr and read it as remove, for real

Uncomplicated firewall is a nice frontend for up tables.

tar

Rsync on a scheduled task is dead simple. If your friend can stomach WSL (Windows subsystem for Linux) being on the machine you might try using that. The command is a one liner:

$rsync -r /path/to/source /path/to/backup

and can be automated with cron.