Paragon Drive Copy & One-Click Backup 2009 disk management and backup software

Drive Copy and One-Click Backup is a complete package for those who want graphical control over storage and backup management tasks.

Drive Backup 9 Professional is the Windows utility supplied with the software. It offers a good range of backup and disk management tasks and an intuitive wizard-based interface.

This version offers some useful new features: we were impressed by the ability to make sector-based backups for quick recovery, which you can supplement with incremental file-based backups to save space on backup media. You can also recover Windows Vista or 2008 Server to a new hardware configuration after replacing a failed component, and there is support for multiple OSs through the GUID Partition Table (GPT).

Drive Backup puts tasks in a pending operations list until you confirm, a useful defence against deleting or overwriting data. You can clone a hard disk, backup or restore from a PBF (Paragon Backup Format) file with a few clicks, or choose more specialised disk operations.

You can boot from the CD, too. However, used and unused hard disk space is shown in virtually the same shade of blue, and hard disks aren’t referred to consistently between Paragon Drive Backup 9, CD operation, Windows and error reporting.

Better diagnostics, error reporting and signposting would improve this product. When trying to save a 15GB boot disk image to a larger disk, Drive Backup returned an uninformative ‘I/O error on hard disk 5’, and frustratingly referred us to Checkdisk to fix a minor cluster fault with an iTunes temp file.

The ease of use and the powerful features across a range of media and operating systems make this useful for managing backups and files, especially over a small multiplatform network.