Paragon’s Hot Processing feature allows it to save locked files, or you can switch to use Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service if you’d prefer.

It’s best viewed as more of a bonus than a full backup utility, though, especially as it’s limited to the imaging of a full partition or disk.Ĭhoose a partition to back up, though, and there’s a good array of options: password protection for archives fast, medium or slow compression and the ability to skip OS auxiliary files. It still isn’t up there with the ease of Norton Ghost, but then disk partitioning has more potential pitfalls than backup.īackup is also present in the form of the integrated Drive Backup 8.5 and, while it isn’t as comprehensive as Ghost, or other dedicated backup utilities such as Acronis True Image 10, it makes a reasonable attempt to cover the basics. Physical disks are viewed graphically (as in Windows Disk Manager) and step-by-step options let you tweak the main settings. The company has gone to great efforts to counter past criticism of its user interfaces, introducing simple wizards for almost every major task in the software. Basic partition management also extends to checking, undeleting, hiding and moving, all of which is simple to achieve. Newly created or formatted partitions can use the Linux Ext2 and Ext3 file systems, as well as ReiserFS and Linux Swap2 for thorough coverage. You can also change the cluster sizes, defragment a partition and convert between FAT16/32 and NTFS formats.

The keyword there is “enlarge”, as it works only when extending a partition into unused disk space – it’s more powerful than Vista’s disk-management console, though. The usual abilities to create, merge, resize and delete partitions are all present, but of particular interest is the new feature that allows enlargement of NTFS partitions on-the-fly in Windows, without the need for a reboot. It’s first and foremost a hard disk-partitioning utility, though, so those options take pride of place at the top.

Paragon partition manager 5