Now it's Paragon for FREE!

[AdIyhc]

Paragon Exact Image 7 SE ( expire 01 Nov '06 )
http://www.vnunet.co.../2165194/exact-image

Paragon Drive Copy 8 Personal SE ( expire on or around 18th Nov '06 )
http://www.vnunet.co...-drive-copy-personal

Two products for free!

[mouser]

nice!

[AdIyhc]

From Paragon website:

2.4 Do you allow upgrades from competitor products on special terms?
Yes, if you currently own a competing product, this is your chance to upgrade to an equivalent Paragon product with 50% off the normal retail price. Email ([email protected]) proof of purchase for the product you are upgrading from. Examples of acceptable proof of purchase include: a scan or photocopy of your manual cover or CD, sales receipt, screen capture showing your registration status etc.
Terms
- exclusive to end-users
- only ESD (Electronic Software Delivery)
- limited by one upgrade per request
- only selected Paragon products
- not available to resellers.

Not sure if we can use the Free Acronis 7 serial to get 50% off. :p

[Cloq]

Nice finds.

[JavaJones]

Anyone have any experience with these Paragon products? I'm trying to get a friend to start imaging his computer and I'd like to know what free/cheap imaging software would be best to recommend to him. Seems there's a lot of these deals lately.

- Oshyan

[app103]

The only Paragon product I have ever used is the CD-ROM Emulator. I have used it for years and LOVE it.

[nudone]

from my experience of acronis and norton and powerquest - i'd go for paragon. that's what i use and it's as a result of using the others.

[JavaJones]

Oho, interesting then! A good recommendation, thanks.

So without having to spend time investigating it (yes, I'm lazy), which one of these free offers should I recommend? I mean they both seem to do similar things... They even seem to be current-ish versions, which is interesting.

- Oshyan

[AdIyhc]

from my experience of acronis and norton and powerquest - i'd go for paragon. that's what i use and it's as a result of using the others.

-nudone (October 15, 2006, 05:10 PM)

Is Exact Image a stripped down version of Drive Backup? Or is Drive Backup the new Exact Image?
Are they still developing their products?
Do you know how much it will compress? For eg. 2.3gb?

Thanks.

[nudone]

i really don't know the answers but usually the highest compression settings from these kinds of programs will give you a 50% reduction in size of the data you are backing up. that is THE highest compression setting. of course, it depends on the majority of your file types - how well they will compress.

i admit, i've not even looked at the highest compression setting with paragon (or with the others for a couple of years) as the increase in hard drive space has made it a non issue - for me, at least.

[Carol Haynes]

I have downloaded copies of the two free Paragon apps, but haven't installed than as I am using other apps at the moment that do the same job - but they may come in handy on another machine in the future.

Generally maximum compression is ~50% but it really depends on what is on your hard disk. If it is loads of EXE and DLL files with loads of JPEG images and MPEG/WMA/MP3 etc. then they are already compressed to the maximum and recompressing them can actually make them bigger! If you mostly have Word and text documents then you will see significant compression.

There is also a trade off with speed - the more you compress generally the longer the imaging takes.

[AdIyhc]

Oic, thank you both for the information.

[patthecat]

from my experience of acronis and norton and powerquest - i'd go for paragon. that's what i use and it's as a result of using the others.

-nudone (October 15, 2006, 05:10 PM)

Is Exact Image a stripped down version of Drive Backup? Or is Drive Backup the new Exact Image?
Are they still developing their products?
Do you know how much it will compress? For eg. 2.3gb?

Thanks.

-AdIyhc (October 15, 2006, 09:06 PM)

Imaging and Disk Copying are 2 different things.

Imaging a hard drive allows you to create a compressed image archive file(s) that you can copy/burn on another storage media.  In order to use it you have to restore the image to a hard drive.  Think of this as keeping a "snapshot state" of your hard drive at a particular point in time.  I think this what Paragon Exact Image does.

Disk Copying a hard drive allows you to do a sector for sector copy of that drive directly to another drive.  No intermediate images or reinstallations necessary as you can just put the copied to drive in your machine and boot up from it.  Typically this is used if you want clone a hard drive or upgrade your hard drive.  Think of this as a "hot swap" cloned copy.  I think this is what Paragon Drive Copy does.

Acronis True Image, and I think Norton Ghost, has both of these features integrated into one software package.  BootItNG and Image For Windows only support the imaging features.
Personally I use True Image and BootItNG depending on my needs and particularly they both have support for running off a bootable CD.

Paragon's offerings segments the features so you only buy what you need:
Exact Image - imaging
Drive Copy - disk copying
Drive Backup - both imaging and disk copying
Hard Disk Manager - both imaging and disk copying and partition management

Given this deal, for personal use, it's worth to download BOTH software (Exact Image and Drive Copy) to try them out.  From Paragon's website, I see that they both have some support for building a bootable cd to run their software, but I don't know if features have been stripped out for these "Special Editions".

patrick

[JavaJones]

Patrick, I would have thought the same thing in terms of the distinction between the two products. However this quote on the Drive Copy page made me wonder again

Once your new system is up and running, you can also use the program as a simple backup tool. Who wants to go to the trouble of using a file-based backup program, manually specifying files and folders, hoping (but never actually knowing for sure) that you're backing up all the information you need? Image backups are much easier by comparison, can be set up with just a few mouse clicks, and short of hard drive failure you can be sure no vital data will be lost.

- Oshyan

[patthecat]

Oshan,

The links from the original post are from vnunet.com and not the official website of Paragon Software.  I think the author in the vnunet article you are referring to got confused.

Here is the real link for Paragon Software to see the features of the software.  Again, I don't know if for this "special edition" if any features are unavailable.

http://www.paragon-software.com

[JavaJones]

Ahhh yes, thanks for the clarification.

- Oshyan

[AdIyhc]

UPDATE:

I used the Acronis True Image 7.0 Registration Screenshot and is able to get a 50% discount on their Paragon Drive Backup 8.0 Personal.

Like to ask you guys - Is it worth it?

[AdIyhc]

WOW, the 50% discount applies to all Paragon Software including server editions.