Paragon Drive Backup 9.0 personal?

[NeilC]

I've just been trialling Macrium

It seems pretty good. It has a Good UI and is very easy to use. I backed up an image of my Windows system/boot partition of 40gb and it created a compressed image a fraction of the size in a few minutes. I removes empty disk space and compressed pretty quick it would seem.

For system restore, the free version provides either a UNIX boot disk or a Bart PE plugin. Both seem to work OK for me but I prefer the Bart plugin. I made up a Bart disk with both the plugin supplied and a copy of my system partition image which has just been installed and populated with my usual core apps. So that one CD should be capable of an emergency restore. I partially tested this and my other PC booted to Bart, the plugin worked and it was all set to go. i didn't actually restore the partition. The paid version supplies an integrated Windows PE boot disk which is a neater, simpler option. but the Bart building process was not hard anyway.

The free version does not do incremental backups. not sure about the paid version. But then i don't THINK I really want them. Maybe I'm missing something here but it would seem better just to back up actually user data using Cobian or something which is a pretty fully fledged free backup app with incremental and differential backups etc.

My main motivator is just having had to rebuild my PC which took most of a day. A system disk image could have saved all that time and effort.

What is the advantage in using images for large amounts of data backup rather then file backups?

[gud4u]

I recently purchased Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009, a suite combining image backup/recovery functions with complete partition-management functions.

I haven't compared various Paragon products, but I assume the suite combines functional modules very typical of other Paragon products.

For image backup/restore performance, I can relate my impression of performance against other image backup/restore apps I've used:
Terabyte IFW/IFD
Acronis TI10

OS partition image backup/restore times are very close for all 3 apps, essentially equal speed for all. I've only done one OS partition restore with this Paragon app - versus perhaps 20 restores with the other apps, but that was fast and successful.

Partition-management functions perform very well in manipulating my multi-partition HD.

I'm pleased with all functions of this product, with just one exception: the HD defrag function takes forever. Performance fine - just slow.

Hope this helps!

[renegade08]

Originally Posted by virtumonde

I guess it depends on read/write capabilities of your Hard Disk.One one of my PC with the product installed,restoring a image from the back-up capsule,or from the HD is done at around 1GB minute(I've done this duzins of times speed is the same).So math is simple.
Restoring a back-up from a DVD-R was veery slow.It took 15-20 minutes to restore a 4GIB size backup.I don't remember the exact speed as i've done this only once.

Edit :sry i'm dumb i thought you ware refferring to Paragon not IFW.Sry

No problem.

You have confused me a lot, when reading the text, but at the end i figured out that you are not refering to IFW.

AFAIK IFW doesn't have backup capsule, right?

From my personal experience Paragon are excellent and every one that are considering reliable backup have to try it.