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Paragon Drive Backup+Recovery 10 Free - good full drive imaging tool

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MilesAhead:
I have an external 2TB WD My Book drive, connected via firewire, single partition.

The trial version of Paragon HD Manager, as well as Paragon Drive Backup Pro 9 both show this drive as having "7,9 GB not formatted" and the remaining space unallocated. Fixed drives are shown correctly, but the nonsensical detection of the external drive makes me rather uncomfortable about this software. (MS management console shows the correct status for this drive, of course)

If anyone is using Paragon software and has an external USB drive, what does it show for you?

-tranglos (November 04, 2009, 08:00 AM)
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When I got Paragon Drive Backup I also bought Seagate external USB drives.  But they are only 250 GB and 500 GB.  Also I was using XP Pro SP2.  I suspect the Vista and W7 compatibility is still not there yet. If you have plain vanilla disk controller you may be okay but I would thoroughly test it before relying on it. It seems like the Macrium has more options afa image backup and restore.  For one thing the paid version gets you WinPE.  It so happens the Linux boot CD recognizes my Raid controller, but if it didn't, I have the avenue of incorporating the Windows driver into the WinPE boot CD.  I did it just for grins.  It was a bit of a hassle because the Raid controller also controls the optical drive.  So when I boot the CD all I really have is Bios compatibility boot.  The only files visible on the CD are files inside the boot image.  I had to learn how to load the Windows driver from the boot image.  Then I could see the rest of the CD and my HD.

I guess that's the long-winded way of saying Macrium is more flexible.
Paragon worked great for me on XP with a plain Sata controller.  Made the boot capsule and the whole bit.  Vista and later I think it has problems.

4wd:
For one thing the paid version gets you WinPE.-MilesAhead (November 04, 2009, 07:14 PM)
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Paragon also include WinPE media with some versions of their programs:

Drive Backup 9 Pro  (currently same price as Personal)
System Backup 2010
Hard Disk Manager Suite 2009

Possibly others, didn't check everything they sell.

MerleOne:
I just performed a quick trial and got a big disappointement :

I installed Paragon B&R 10 Free, performed a backup of a 33GB Vista system partition, the resulting image was around 23 GB after 55 min.  But I couldn't mount the image within Paragon.  Worse, the extension chosen for saving the First cylinder special backup, .pfm, conflicts with a Vista Font tool.

So I got it uninstalled right away.

I tried instead Keriver Image 4, which was much faster, around 25min for the same partition, and the resulting partition is mounted right away.  I got it from  GAOTD a few weeks ago.

MilesAhead:
Hmmmm, I never tried the Mount Image feature before.  Just tried it and copied a file out of the image in Explorer.  Pretty cool esp. considering it works in the free version. The docs say it mounts as FAT32 but for a 20 or 40 GB image I imagine that's no problem.

4wd:
Just tried PBRFE10, (I have Hard Disk Manager Suite 2009):

Backup is a little slow, (Best Compression), I suspect this is because it's trying to compress already compressed files, (png, MPEG4, etc), on the partition I tried.
Verified by doing the same backup without compression - it did it in less than half the time.
Unfortunately there's nowhere where you can filter files to not compress.

Backup file mounted and unmounted without a problem but even if you can't, you can browse through the contents within PBRFE10 and export files to another drive.

Restore from within XP went without a hitch and was approx. 30%-40% faster than the, (Best Compression), backup operation.

So I created a Recovery Media on a spare Flash drive and booted from that and was pleasantly surprised when all my HDDs were listed, (AMD 780G with SATA in AHCI mode), something Acronis usually failed to do without having to find the latest filters.  A restore using the previously created uncompressed image took 1 minute longer than it did creating it under XP, (6.5 minutes).

Having an extension *.pfm is pretty much a non-event AFAIAC because that's what 'Open With' is for, (there are other extensions which clash, eg. *.nfo, you only have to go to The File Extension Source and pick a letter).
The extension PFM is also used by:
PFM     Printer Font Metrics (Adobe Systems Incorporated)
PFM    Portable Float Map Graphics Data

The docs say it mounts as FAT32 but for a 20 or 40 GB image I imagine that's no problem.-MilesAhead (November 05, 2009, 05:38 PM)
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The drive information on my mounted backup shows it as NTFS.  I don't see how or why they would bother with an on-the-fly NTFS->FAT32 conversion just for working with a mounted image.

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