Today in this backup software review, I’ll be looking at the PC back software called Paragon Backup and Recovery. As a quick overview, I’ll be straight up and tell you that I’ll be giving this software 5 out of 5 stars.

I’ve been looking for good backup software and when I came across the software from Paragon, I just had to write a backup software review on it. Why? Well, it’s pretty easy to use, it really does work and heck they even have a free version!

Did I say free? Yep – that’s not limited time freebie either. It’s 100% free. I will mention in this backup software review that there are a few features left out, but for basic – just works backups, this is the bomb.

Backup Software Review – Testing

I had the chance to really test it with my son’s hp laptop. It was having battery issues and well, the store we purchased it from wanted to send it in to their servicing department. My son didn’t want to loose anything and knowing that a lot of these retailers will wipe your drive (say goodbye data), we had to back it up.

I loaded the software and ran it on his Athlon based Windows 7 home laptop. This laptop does have a complex drive structure with hidden, built-in recovery partitions, so it’s a good drive to do backup tests with and tell about in this backup software review.

It did take some time to create the backup. That’s one of the failings of having way too much information. It does take time to back it up. I found that initial settings to be a bit confusing but in the end, I just opted into backing up everything. This was the right choice and worked for the backup software review.

The next step was creating a bootable cd disk to restore the drive later. Again, pretty painless. Finally, to test the backup before sending it into servicing, I put in an identical hard drive to the original that had no data on it at all.

In the backup software review, again I had to fool with the interface that you boot from with the created backup cd rom disk. But it wasn’t too difficult. There’s some excellent tutorials on video sharing sites to guide the way.

The restore took again, a bit of time. One nice feature was the fact that I could grow the partitions to a larger drive. The only thing I didn’t like was that it all partitions were grown proportional to all the other partitions. I would have liked to select the partition to grow, as a lot of the hidden partitions didn’t need the extra space. But for free backup software, who can really complain?

Backup Software Review – Test Results

I’m glad to tell you the end result was magic. The drive was restored perfectly and I’ve performed more backups and restores with this software just to confirm the functionality before writing this backup software review. It just works!

Be sure to check out Paragon Backup and Recovery. It’s not a day to day snapshot utility like Time Machine but a robust backup the whole drive utility. Paragon gets a solid five star rating in the backup software review.

I’ve been around the block several times over the past decade when it comes to computer backup. This includes backups within the server as well as the destkop realms.

To me, backing up computer data just shouldn’t be that hard. You will find though, that this is not the case. It seems to be the hardest thing in the world to do properly. I’m not a Mac lover, but I have to take my hat off to Mac for their Time Machine application. They do make it pretty easy with that!

But for us PC people, we still can have a lot of problems. Personally, I like to know for a fact that my hard drive in my computer or on my servers are completely backed up.

Recently I started to experiment with the Paragon software line. I will honestly say that I’m very impressed. Let me tell you the good and the bad about this line of backup software.

Computer Backup with Paragon Software – The Bad

Let me start off with the negatives first. I’ve used both the workstation version and the server version. The first thing I didn’t like was the overall complexity of the applications.

Let me tell you, that the only thing that these apps don’t do is serve coffee, lol. When you start working with the Backup software, you’ll find that isn’t not super easy to navigate. For example, when you backup the whole drive, trying to recover just a partition is tricky to decifer.

Next, when I was working with it on a server, any type of raid controller will confuse the restoration software and you’ll need to use the BartPE solution to create a recovery CD. This is something that I’m still working on. So, again, a bit of goofing around to get things recovered.

The final negative that I can point out is if the hard drive you are trying to backup is having any issues – such as bad sectors or such, the backup will fail. This is one place that I wish the backup software would make a log file on and just continue. At least then I can recover a bad drive and fix the damage on a cloned new drive.

Computer Backup with Paragon Software – The Great!

Now, don’t let all of the above turn you off. There’s a lot to love in this application. First, for recoveries on a basic desktop, it works really well. No complicated RAID cards and everything just works.

When you enter the server realm, you’ll find a lot of goodies that just don’t exist anywhere else at the same price point.

I’m currently moving a server from 2003 SBS to 2008 Std server. I decided that I needed some time to poke at this problem to create a great migration path. With the server edition of the software, I’m able to create a backup that is a virtual machine!

I implemented this feature. I will tell you that it took a few hours to create a vmware image of the server, but it did it perfectly! The next morning I had the client’s server image running on the vmware player in my lab!!!

Plus another great feature of the software is that it just works. If it backs everything up and comes back with two thumbs up, you can pretty much be guaranteed that you can recover your desktop or server.

My son had to send in his laptop to be repaired and we were able to do this exact thing. Within two hours of getting the laptop back, all was back to normal with his apps and data.

The best thing of all though is the fact that the software is very reasonably priced. I’ve spent thousands of dollars in the past to purchase backup software for windows servers. And hundreds for good workstation software.

For the paragon server software, you’ll be spending a lot less then $1,000! With the ability to virtualize at no additional charge at time of this article being written.

For the home user, you can actually pick up the basic backup software that works 100% for absolutely nothing! There is no better deal then that.

So I’d recommend you check out the Paragon line of products.