Most of us who use our computers regularly will find that it's inevitate, from time to time, to format the computer's hard disk and install a clean version of Windows.

It is certainly satisfying to get back to the PC’s initial speed, but restoring programs, drivers, documents and settings certainly isn’t. So Paragon's Drive Copy & One Click Backup offers a selection of tools to circumvent this laborious task.

The pair of programs will copy the entire contents of a hard disk to a separate partition of the disk, an external hard disk or a set of writable DVDs. The user can then restore the computer to its previous state with all the original files, programs and settings intact. This can be done either directly from Windows or by inserting the writable DVDs, should the computer fail to start for some reason.

This is all very well, but the problem is that duplicating the entire contents of the average hard disk takes a huge amount of space. Even using the program’s best compression setting (which itself increases processing time) our modest 50GB of data still amounted to 25GB, and not everyone will be able to spare this.

That said, it was very easy to back up our test computer to a clutch of writeable DVDs with a couple of clicks, using the program's wizard. The programs also allow you to copy the contents of the existing hard disk to a new one which is useful if you want to upgrade.

All tasks within the programs are wizard-driven and this makes backing up and copying data simple. Thankfully, there is no need to redo the backup on the entire hard disk every time you add to it or make changes, as it includes what are called incremental backups, saving only the changes made since the last one. This can be set up to occur regularly, as can any other backup or copying tasks.

However, we would have liked to have had the option to backup selected files, as many users won’t have the space to backup their entire hard disks. If you have, though, it could make backing up much easier.

Vista compatible: Yes