Product Reviews

Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 8.5 is an integrated suite of tools for managing your hard disks. While imaging, backup and recovery tools are well accounted for, the focus of the suite is on partition creation and manipulation.

Hard disks and their partitions are displayed graphically, so you get an instant snapshot of the location and size of each partition, which file system it uses, the size of the formatted volume and the amount of space left. Selecting a disk provides a wealth of further information as well as some common management tasks.

When you make

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fundamental changes to your computer's file system, it's essential that you don't make a mistake. Resizing the wrong partition or creating a new one in the wrong place could have disastrous consequences for your data. To reduce the risk of errors and steer you though the tools on offer, Hard Disk Manager has a large collection of step-by-step wizards. As an extra safety feature, all changes you describe through the wizards must be reviewed and approved before anything is actually altered on the disk.

Unlike other disk utilities such as Norton Ghost, individual file or folder backup is not possible; you must back up an entire drive or partition. Subsequent backups can be differential, which means only changes made since the last backup are stored. However, files can be individually recovered alongside entire disk and partition recovery. This can take place from within the Windows interface, a recovery CD or recovery partition.

Hard Disk Manager is a useful tool, especially for those with multiple operating systems, but if your backup requirements extend beyond the partition or drive level, you are better off with Acronis True Image 10 Home.