Before I start, a friendly reminder that you only have a day left to enter the contest for a free Clickfree Transformer backup system. Tell me a backup horror story.
It’s one thing to backup the files on your local computer and another to backup files stored on other computers on your network, or Network Attached Storage drives or servers.
In the first case, odds are you simply drag and drop files and folders that are important to you to a blank CD or DVD and burn your backup.
In the latter, well, usually a much more complex process with dedicated backup software is required.
Recently I grabbed a Clickfree Transformer SE to do some simple backup work on my desktop and laptop computers. Basically, the Clickfree Transformer plugs into a USB port. Then you plug a USB Hard Drive into the Transformer SE.
And the magic begins. The software quickly scans your local system and copies important documents, photos, media and other files to the USB drive attached to the Transformer SE.
But back to the theme of this post, ‘backing up files across a network easily’. Basically there’s two things you need to do.
Mapping your network drives
First, you have to have ‘mapped’ the network drives containing files to be backed up. Mapping the drive is a simple process that tells your local Windows operating system to treat the network drive as if it is a local drive — even assigning a drive letter to the network drive.
Microsoft has a pretty good walkthrough on mapping drives in Windows XP. The process for Vista and Windows 7 is very similar.
Configuring the Clickfree Transformer SE
And this process is pretty simple. First, you have to get to the Clickfree backup configuration screens.
If you’ve seen a backup run, then you know there’s a countdown prior to the process beginning. When you cancel that countdown, you abort the current backup. But you also now have the ability to configure your backup by selecting which drives (local or mapped network) and file types you want to back up.
This is important because it’s possible, when backing up mapped network drives, to try and backup more files than you have drive space available for…should you try and backup your entire photo, video, and music libraries to one drive, for example. If this happens, then the backup also fails to the configuration screens, allowing you to tweak the config so you can fit the backup on the drive.
Ready to roll?
And that’s all there is to it. The next time your backup runs, either manually or automatically, files on those mapped network drives will be backed up along with the ones on your local computer drives. Of course, depending on how much you’re backing up, you may need to split the backup across a couple of drives 
