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If your computer goes haywire, Clickfree has your backups

What will you do if your computer crashes? Do you have a plan to recover and restore your files?

I'm talking about all those photos, songs and documents that reside on your computer's hard drive.

If you're like most computer users, you don't regularly back up your files. If you do have a system, chances are you don't back up these files often enough to be able to restore everything if your system crashes.

There's also a good chance you have more than one computer in your home or business. Do you back up the data on each of them? Probably not.

Enter Clickfree, where making backups simple is a way of life.

"We had an idea that backup should be amazingly easy," Clickfree President Ian Collins said. "The mass market is just not backing up (its) computers. We knew there had to be no silly questions about drives, volume labels or hunting around for software to install. We knew it would be a barrier and people would continue to lose photos, tax returns and all the things they saved on their computers."

I recently put Clickfree's newest product, the C2N, to the test. The portable hard drive uses a customer's wireless home network to back up files on each computer on the network. To get started, you must plug in the drive, using the built-in universal serial bus cord, to each computer and then follow the simple instructions.

Once each computer has the Clickfree software installed, leave the drive connected to one of the computers on the network. Each time a file is saved on any of the networked computers, files are backed up on the Clickfree drive. It's that simple.

The C2N works on both Windows-based (XP operating system, or later) and Apple (operating system 10.5 or later) computers. The drive I am testing is backing up files from two Macs and a PC laptop. These backups happen automatically.

Moving files from the backup drive to any of the networked computers is also simple. Files from each computer may be browsed on the Clickfree drive and moved to any computer on the network.

Photos are organized into their own folder, making it easy to send them by e-mail, post them to online photo sites or set them as a computer's desktop background image.

The C2N comes in three sizes: 250 gigabytes, 320GB and 500GB with prices ranging from $139.99 to $179.99. It may be purchased on the Clickfree site or at most major electronics retailers. The website, www.clickfree.com, lists all purchase locations.

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