Just a follow up on this. I have tried using network connections for backup. The problem I've found is twofold: first, I can't get network access to my Buffalo NAS drive (LS220D) to work at all unless I enable SMB 1.0, and Microsoft say that SMB 1.0 is unsafe, leaves you vulnerable to virus attacks (including ransomware attacks) and should be disabled (note: enabling SMB2 on the NAS drive doesn't seem to make any difference to this that I could see). Second, even if you ignore Microsoft warnings and enable SMB 1.0 anyway, network access (at least from Windows 10) is flakey and unreliable. On a good day, it works (and incidentally, when it works it sets the date & time on backed up files correctly). But very often it stops working - as it has done for me just now. Rebooting does not solve the problem. Resetting my network adapter on my Windows 10 PC probably would but I can't be doing that every day.
So that's my choice: backup using ftp (connection seems to be reliable, but ftp server has a bug that prevents date & time being set correctly on files, which means that incremental backups don't work); or backup using a network connection which does set date & time correctly, but which is flakey and very unreliable.
There may be other options which allow me to use ftp and back everything up to a single file (and therefore manage the date-time issue themselves, avoiding the problem with the ftp server). But I don't want that sort of solution because I want to able to easily browse and access my own backed-up files as ordinary files and folders - preferably using File Explorer is that would only work reliably.
Could someone from Buffalo Support step in at this point and suggest a solution please? My questions are:
(1) How can I get network access to the NAS drive to work reliably from Windows 10 (preferably without needing SMB 1.0)
(2) How I can set the date-time on files correctly (essential for incremental backups) if I connect using FTP?
Answers to either or both questions would be very much appreciated. Thank you!