Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite

There are normally two kinds of hard disk manager: ones that make an image of the entire disk for a backup and ones that can change the arrangement of partitions on the disk so you can have one or more disks (C:, D:, E: etc) on the same physical disk.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite (HDM 2009) does both, so it could be all you need to keep a hard disk in shape.

The software now presents a wide range of its functions as wizards, which makes them easier to understand and use. There are wizards for backup, partitioning, copying and wiping disks.

The single biggest enhancement in the program, though, is that it now does file-by-file backup as well as full image backup. This means you can select individual folders or files to back up without having to wait for a complete copy of the hard disk to be made. There’s no scheduling facility to make this an automatic operation, but you can use the Windows scheduler if you have the higher-end version of XP or Vista.

There are some slight oddities in the program, such as it demanding exclusive access to any disk it's defragmenting. Other defragmenters, including the one built into Windows, happily work in the background while you’re running other things, but HDM 2009 requires a reboot and works on its own, bypassing Windows entirely. The program reports a time to finish with an increasing time count, too, which is disconcerting. It took a very slow four hours to defragment 85GB of files in our tests.

The program can change the relative size of partitions, alter the filing system a partition uses and control which operating system is used when the PC starts, but it can’t split a single partition into two or more smaller partitions, which is a reasonably common requirement as partitioning goes.

It does support Windows Vista better, though, including 64-bit Vista, which the previous version didn’t. It can also help correct start-up problems, so if you can live with its few rough edges, it’s a pretty comprehensive tool, at a good price.