Paragon 2013 free

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

I would appreciate any views on above. Is it as good as Acronis?

Edit I see the download is from download.com Is that site clean, I recall reading something about it having spyware?

 

I used Acronis for a number of years doing only manual, full backups and I have to say that it always worked for me. However, the continuous numerous bugs that came with each annual release just got me plain annoyed. They had been told many times by many users on their forum about the lack of QA and to their credit they did seem to try and fix the support and maybe the QA but it didn't seem to have the desired effect. The release of Acronis products seemed to be driven by the calendar and the marketing department rather than the viability of the new release.

This is my opinion, others may differ:
Acronis has more features than Paragon but they didn't have any value for my way of working. It isn't easy to do an archive verification in Paragon immediately after the archive creation (tick a box in Acronis). Paragon has a scripting language that gets referred to for anything out of the ordinary. IMO, it is clumsy and lacking in all the features to make it a good scripting language and you shouldn't have to write scripts to do what are considered common backup tasks.

Paragon appears to be less trouble-prone but also suffers from the recovery environment being Linux-based which may mean driver issues. If you buy the paid product you get the tools to build your own WinPE recovery CD/USB key so you can run in a Windows environment and also load any special drivers that are needed. This used to be quite simple with Paragon but MS changed the licensing rules for WinPE so you have to download the WAIK or whatever to do the build. This applies to any vendor using WinPE in such a manner, not just paragon.

I think it is fair to say the users on the Acronis forum are very knowledgeable and really try to use all the features of the program and thus report a lot of problems. I don't think the Paragon user base tends to do this. In fact, I'd say that a large number of Paragon users never verify an archive.

I have the paid version of Paragon B&R and the support has been very good when I had a question. The Paragon manual is fair but far from ideal in terms of how to use the various commands.

With the free version you have nothing to lose but make sure you try a restore to a spare HD so you know if it really works. A backup that you don't know if it will restore on your particular hardware is only half a backup.

I don't have any problem with CNet's download.com but I am also very careful in making sure the software writer hasn't included any add-on toolbars in the setup procedure. Read the screens before clicking!

 

Thanks

i see the 'free' rescue kit is only got through facebook and you have to register for the 'free' back up/restore

 

Not sure if the free "rescue kit" is the same thing. IIRC, Paragon used to have some product with that or a similar name. Paragon's product list can get very confusing especially if you add in some historical products.

The Paragon backup and recovery free program will have the means to create the rescue media without going elsewhere.

I'll add a couple more things to my comments about Acronis and Paragon.

A thing that ticked me off about Acronis was its wanting to validate old archives when the program was started and there was no global means at the time to turn this off. If you started the program and it started to validate an old archive you couldn't shut it down until it finished. I want the program to do things when I want it to.

Paragon's UI is not too bad once you get used to it but it certainly isn't light years ahead of Acronis although I don't know what the later versions of Acronis look like.

 

Amen on that one! I picked up one of those toolbar add-ons browser hijack malware a week or two ago. Some are ready to sue CNet for praising software that's full of that stuff. It was a YouTube downloader and from what I've read, one can't find one on CNet that "doesn't" contain malware.

 

Forgot that still if advertised as free and you have to register to get a key I think i will give a miss

 

Not really much to ask in order to get a good free program, IMO. This is good stuff not crapware.

 

Looked at it wrong I thought it needed address etc but its just name and email

True - it has the ability to burn the recovery disk

 

If you wanna make the WinPE you can check out SIW2's PE maker.

xttp://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=335734

I've made it and it works fine and dandy.It also has tools that you can use to make/improve your PE and custom it towards your liking. Try it and you will like it On my experience I am using ATI Home 2011/2012 but my backups are only limited to whole system image backup/file folder backup. Never needed to use the other features really because I have a schedule I religously follow(for backing up). Compared to Paragon, the speed of backing up and verification is a hands-down for Acronis. On one of my system a 320gb 3 boot partition setup will be backed up in only 8 minutes + another 8 minutes for verification. On Paragon it's close to 1 hour without verification. That slow backing up was explained here in the Paragon forums but I seem to not remember where it was. Maybe MechAn can help you with that. Acronis also recovers it faster than Paragon. On stability I have not yet any major issues with both Paragon and Acronis.

Alternatively if you wanna make the WinPE of Acronis without WAIK or some good insights for WinPE you can check out links below.

HERE

HERE

HERE

 

I am surprised.

The new paragon engine is faster than any of the others.

Not sure what is the problem causing yours to be slow.

 

I'm using B&R Free 2012 (it works well for me), and wonder if the 2013 version is faster -- is there a reason to upgrade?

 

No real reason to change from 2012 free to 2013 free. It is the same build. Just the name has changed.

 

Just wanted to know...
Win7 64 bit.
B&R 10 home (paid version) with winPE and built in recovery disk builder.
I have both disks built.
Used to use it with Winxp and it worked fine (both backup/restore, scheduled differential backups for each day of the week then a new full backup on Sunday, repeat). Another member here had instructions on how do do this by editing the scripts and creating a schedule in task scheduler, and it worked great.
What I would like to know is B&R13 free "compatible" with images written with B&R 10 home?
Is B&R2013 free any better than 10 home paid?
Should I just stick with B&R home 10?

Thanks
Bill

 

Couple of ways to look at it.

If it is working reliably, and regarding backups that is the one and only word to be concerned about, then why bother changing? You have to re-qualify all your procedures and test that you can indeed restore properly.

OTOH, if you have a method that gives you a reliable backup that can be restored if things go wrong then you have nothing to lose to try the new version since you can always revert to the old version by a restore.

Note that later versions should be able to restore archives made from earlier versions but the early version won't understand the later archive.

 

pomonabill221,

With the Free version you do *not* get WinPE (i.e. do *not* get Paragon WinPE Boot Media Builder) ! It only include Linux Boot Media.