SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR BACKING UP COMPUTER FILES OVER A WIDE AREA COMPUTER NETWORK

A portable computer back up system copies user-selected files for back up as the computer is being used, and when the computer senses a network connection and the network is relatively available, the blocks of the files to be backed up are interleaved with, e.g., metadata and transmitted to a remote facility via the network. The back up system suspends the backing up of files if a disk space limit is reached, transmits any copied files when the network is available, deleting the back up copies of the files from disk, and then resumes copying files for back up. Also, each time the portable computer is connected to a network, it determines what other devices are on the network, and if the computer recognizes the network configuration, the computer reconfigures its settings as appropriate for, e.g., printing to the printer that happens to be connected to the particular network to which the portable computer is connected at the time.