I used to use Paragon Hard Disk Manager many years ago and found it to be reliable, simple to use, and with a nice interface. But for some reason, I stopped using it. I don't see much talk about Paragon Hard Disk Manager or other Paragon products lately. Does anyone still use Paragon Hard Disk Manager? Is it still reliable?
Hi @Hadron EASTER here. I also used to make good use of Paragon Hard Disk Manager and found it just as reliable. Checking and looking into my toolbox of disk management tools I notice I still have version 15 sitting there virtually in mothballs anymore. I believe their newest release might be up to 17 by now. I recall it as recently as a year ago or less of not meeting a required change I needed to convert a MBR to GPT Disk. The error was that it failed to do a smooth transition. As such and with data still valid luckily I turned to AOMEI Partition Assistant which did the task quickly and efficiently. Once bitten twice shy, I depend on AOEMI now for sensitive disk management chores. Not a single issue or scare from it. In my older systems and even on Windows 8 early on it did perform well back then and maybe even is better now. I just selected what did work correctly when faced with a pinch and was comfortable with my alternative so I no longer bother with Paragon.
Back in the days of yore there were many fewer tools to move around partitions & manage hard drives. I used Paragon products way back then. There were even a couple operations that I personally only knew of a Paragon product would work on. But Paragon's GUIs were primitive, hideous & confusing. As soon as I could find other products that did the same operations I switched away from that Paragon product & never looked at it again.
Paragon Hard Disk Manager Advanced looks to be a complete package, including backup and recovery and a partition manager. Does anyone know if it uses VSS for backup?
There's a ton of Forum entries on-line referring to VSS type errors and using the VSSADMIN command to deal with some of them so my guess would be YES.
Are there problems? Which forum? I just searched the English Paragon Support Forum > System Backup for VSS and didn't find anything.
Paragon, like Image For Windows' "PhyLock," also has its own VSS-like service called "Hot Core." It is not installed by DEFAULT (use of VSS is) and if you choose to use it, it must be installed manually. The claim is that it is as good as VSS in setting up its snapshots. I don't know how this is possible since VSS is designed to act in consort with tasks that designate themselves as "VSS Writers" so that writers may bring their output files into a consistent state (flushing file caches, etc.) prior to the snapshot being considered consistent. "Hot Core" would have to pretend to be VSS and talk to these "writers" and gain their feedback prior to freezing a snapshot... not even PhyLock can do that. Both PhyLock and Hot Core can freeze the FileSystem but there may be some inconsistent files available at that point in the process (most likely cacheable databases). Anyway, HERE's a Paragon Knowledge Base article concerning VSS issues.
Hi Frog. When I first started using IFW, I think from memory that PHYLock was the default, but I could never get it to work. It would eventually time out. So, I switched over to VSS and have never had any problems with it. I wonder why developers decide to develop their own.