Group test: Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 Personal

Paragon, founded in 1994, is an international software company that specialises in disk management and storage management utilities. Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 Personal is its newly released home and small-business product.

As the name implies, this Paragon product is rather more than just a disk-imaging and backup utility. In addition it provides a toolkit for hard disk repair and maintenance. Tools include a Master Boot Record (MBR) updater, a sector editor, a disk defragmenter, filesystem conversion, a disk surface test and more.

Paragon uses the standard Installshield wizard for the installation and once installed, following a reboot, the product is ready to use. For online purchases you receive a key via email that allows download of the full program. Rather than include the ability to generate a recovery CD image from within the main application, Paragon provides its recovery CD as a separate downloadable Iso image which will need to be burnt to a blank CD using a third-party CD burner.

Some disk-imaging products here, such as Symantec Norton Save & Restore or R-Tools R-Drive Image, go to some lengths to make the backup and restore process as simple as possible by using wizards and limiting the information on screen at any time.

Although Paragon also uses wizards to guide you through the backup or restore processes, it will suit those who like to see a little bit more information on the screen. The start screen is particularly informative about the status of the hard disks in a system. For example, it shows the type and version of filing system used on each disk, the disk serial number, the partition IDs and the partition type.

Clicking on the Back Up icon at the extreme left of the top toolbar brings up the Back Up Wizard. Using seven successive screens, this allows you to specify the data to back up, alter backup settings, select the data destination, schedule the backup and check your selections.

On the penultimate screen the wizard displays the message ‘Press Next to start the backup process’. Clicking ‘Next’ reveals a final screen where you click on ‘Finish’ to close the wizard. At this point, if you chose immediate, rather than scheduled backup, you might expect the specified image backup to start. In practice it is necessary to click on the Apply changes icon in the top toolbar before any commands are processed.

This slightly confusing behaviour occurs because, by default, the software runs in ‘virtual mode’, which allows rollback of any command choices before they are committed. This option can be turned off by selecting – Tools – Settings – Virtual mode option. The ‘Allow virtual mode’ box can then be unchecked to allow an immediate response to backup commands. The simple addition of an explanatory message to the appropriate wizard screen would clear up this confusion.

As purely a disk-imaging product and compared to the other four products in this group test, the higher cost and slightly below average backup speed of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 Personal, combined with the slight confusion caused by the Virtual mode option, would result in a low overall score for this software. But the undeniably useful extra features make this an excellent all-in-one package.

This article is part of a group test drive-imaging software.
See also:
Acronis True Image 10 Home
R-Tools R-Drive Image 3.0
Runtime Software Drive Image XML
Symantec Norton Save & Restore

Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf download above.

Group test: Acronis True Image 10 Home

Quality disk-imaging software from Acronis  02 Feb 2007

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