Paragon Hard Disk Manager 14 Suite

We bought two of these for our small business, on the recommendation of our external IT consultant, to backup desktops.The one that is still sealed is going back to Amazon. I suppose we will have to eat the one that we installed in order to find out that this software is not fit for its purported purpose.After installing, I attempted to make a Windows recovery CD or DVD, to be used to restore a damaged system from an external backup media. I initially tried the "easy way", which was to make a recovery disk using the Recovery Media Builder (RMB). The documentation clearly states that this should be doable, documents the steps, and states that the recovery disk is made from the components installed on your machine, without the need to download and install WAIK from Microsoft.After going through the dialogs, all it would do when I clicked "Save the .iso file" was to say "Unknown Error". Not very helpful.I contacted Paragon Technical Support, and a day later I got a reply from someone named "Igor", for whom English is not a native language, saying "Please use the Boot Media Builder (BMB)". That is literally the entire response from Paragon Technical Support.Well, I did not want to use the BMB, because it is the "hard way", requiring messing around with WAIK. I replied to Igor, asking him if it was really the case that something as simple as a recovery media builder, which EVERY backup system includes, and has never failed for me before across three other backup systems, could not be made to work in Paragon.While waiting for his reply, I decided to go ahead and try the BMB. I downloaded all 1+ GB of WAIK from Microsoft, burned the .iso to a DVD, installed WAIK, and tried the BMB. The dialog worked right up to the point that it asked me to select the CD device to which the .iso should be written, and... presented me with an empty dialog. The CD burner was not there.Backup software is incredibly important to get right, the first time, every time. Paragon cannot seem to make even the most simple, straightforward operations work. I don't want to think about the possibility of depending on this software to restore a crashed system from a backup with several incrementals.I was able to make a Linux recovery disk with the RMB, but I don't trust Linux recovery disks for Windows systems, and neither should you. On some hardware configurations, the Linux side that's supposed to restore backups is not properly in sync with the Windows side that creates the backups, and you and up with backups that cannot be restored.So, we have to figure out another backup solution that is not Paragon.I used to recommend Acronis True Image, but Acronis has gone into the crapper in the last few years (besides the bloat and the funky user interface changes, Acronis has been getting a reputation for non-restorable backups, which I believe is precisely because their Linux-only restore system is not in sync with the Windows-based backup system for some configurations).I've had good experiences with Macrium Reflect on the computers I am responsible for outside of work.The absolute best out there is ShadowProtect, which we use for our Windows Small Business Servers. They have extraordinary technical support based in the USA, and have always been very responsive and helpful when we've engaged their technical support. They are unfortunately also the most expensive by far.

This is a rather complete package of disk copy software, rather slow to open and slow to copy drives, also very slow to do drive analysis. If you just want a simple complete, bootable approach to a complete drive copy then buy Casper 8.0, faster, easy and very simple to understand.

Have used Paragon products before and is the main reason I purchased this product. Works, but not as straight forward as some of the other products I have used in the past. Ghost and Acronis products are more straight forward when it come to making an image of a drive. Ghost is perfect as it will automatically resize partitions if you do not personally want to set the size(s) youself. Acronis, which I have also purchased, is a bit more of a problem when restoring and image. I think I now have the Paragon HD manager figured out, but took some time to get it right.q

The problem with Paragon is that it is a downloadable product, and any packaging is done by third party, and it has a 50-50 chance of working. So with the purchased key, you need to call paragon and download the latest version and use (after they confirm that this is a good key) what you purchased.

I wanted software that would perform three specific tasks on Windows 8.1: 1) a full backup of the entire system (clone); 2) a scheduled, differential backup of the C: Drive; and 3) the capacity to make a Boot Drive. I'm obviously not a pro computer user, but I wanted third-party software that is reliable and that doesn't try to take over all the functions on my computer. Paragon is getting the job done. It also has partition management capabilities if I should need this at another time. Thank you!

Loaded the software on a new HP Laptop, running Win 8.1.This caused many problems on the machine, including not being able to run Paragon.The recovery routine had to be ran to load an older image of the operating system

would not buy again

Did not fix problem with other clone attempt, but worked well when doing new clone of hard drive.