Paragon Backup and Recovery 12 Compact - GAOTD

Paragon Backup and Recovery 12 Compact is available for free today on the Giveaway Of The Day site:

https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

Listed features:

Full Windows 8 support.
Support for the latest HDD standards. Enjoy support for AFD (Advanced Format Drive), 2TB+ and non-512B sector size drives.
Boot Corrector. Powerful utility that recovers the operating system’s startup ability.
Selective Restore. Extract individual files and folders from an archive without restoring an entire image. Use the Restore Wizard and simply check the files that you’d like to restore.
Partition alignment for bare metal restore. Partition alignment during restoring to new hard drives ensures that there will be no performance loss due to incorrect partition alignment.
Smart Backup Wizard. Easily secure valuable data without additional configurations.
Encrypted Backup. To avoid unauthorized access to your backup files, you can easily encrypt them within our backup wizards.

As usual the giveaway versions don't include Win PE but you can burn a Linux recovery CD/DVD from the included ISO in case you ever need to restore a disk image.

I've used a number of free versions of Paragon B&R and it's always worked well.

Note: Be aware of the popup to install "Software Informer" after B&R finishes. It's not a necessary part of the process, but simply an add on.

 

Does anyone know if you can install this over the top of version 10? Or, would I be better off un-installing version 10 and then installing this version? Will this version be able to see/read my backups made by version 10?

 

The instructions at GOTD say to uninstall previous versions before installing this new one. That's a good question about backward compatibility with previous file and image backups. Paragon tech support is available for the giveaway while it's active, so I would check with them (and let us know here what you find out).

Edit: I've asked on the GOTD website whether or not previous backups are compatible with the new version. I'll post back when I get a reply

Edit 2: I've asked the question about compatibility in the Paragon forum here since it hasn't been answered on the giveaway site.