Sharing photo, music and videos stored as part of SmartWare back up

I have set up SmartWare backup for 2 laptops which seems to be working well. But I haven’t managed to put any media so that it can be shared & viewed mainly because I thought that it the storage device would be able to detect these items which were already stored on the drive. Do I have to copy or move the files across to the public folders or should it be able to see the media files held as backups?

Not clear exactly what you are saying. If the backup works and the media files were included in the backup, you should see the files in your backup data directory. Do you see them there or not? As for sharing/viewing, I am guessing you meant viewing from a DLNA client device like a TV or bluray player, right? If so, then have you checked whether or not in the dashboard’s settings tab, under Media, that DLNA Media Streaming is set to On?