Paragon backup, whats the difference

Trying paragon backup before I buy it but I notice you have 2 options toback up one is a partition and the other is the disk?

whats the difference, wont paragon allow you to restore the partition of the disk image or is it all or one?

I like to keep a back up in the event of virus or similar..

 

First off which version of software are you referring to? There are many different versions. Secondly, the difference is simply, one is at the partition level, the other is the entire disk, depending on the version of software being either free or paid, you may only have the option to restore at a specific level.

 

the free version so far.. when I ran it under the usb device I had the option for both.... are you saying it wont?

 

In the free version I believe the biggest difference is the fact that you don't have the ability to restore at the file level, it has to be performed at the Disk or Partition level, forgive me I don't use the free editions much, if at all. Ultimately, I would recommend doing a backup at the full disk level, because you can always restore a single partition, but not vice versa.

 

thats what I thought.. thank you very much

 

I have recently been experimenting with the free version of Paragon 9 and found that when using the CD/DVD or USB recovery boot disk in this version, you have the option to backup in file level mode, or what they call RAW mode, as well as partition or whole disk options. I believe RAW mode to be disk sector level mode. RAW mode produces image files, while file level mode produces archive files. You need to look into some of the options available on each screen to find these choices, or I believe it defaults to file level archiving.

However when restoring from either an archive (arc) or an image (img), no matter what level you select, I notice in the check information stage, the Archive settings of back up mode always say "Only data & logical structure". I think it should read "Restore mode" at this point rather than backup mode, as I know I have already backed up in RAW mode and are currently trying to restore that image! So far I have not found how to get the restore into RAW sector level mode. I seem to be able to back up at RAW sector level, but not restore at that level from the recovery boot disk on the free version 9. I suspect Matt just might be correct here! Not sure if running a restore from the Paragon control panel running under Windows gives you more scope!

The end result is often an unbootable disk or partition restoration. I suspect that unless you can get down to the raw sector level you do not include the system and boot file partitions in your restoration!

 

RAW mode is all of the disk sectors in the complete disk or partition depending on what you selected. It is intended for backing up disks that have problems such that Paragon cannot make sense of the file structure or has an unsuppoted file system.

While the programs when imaging do backup sectors they do use the file system to determine what sectors are "in-use" so the image will be smaller - a RAW image will be the size of the partition(s) and this also means increased time to create the image.

There is no need for a RAW normally.

 

What he said.