Review: Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional

Modern hard disks and OSs are pretty reliable. Generally speaking, they just work. But sometimes things don't go as planned (or designed), and you need tobring out the big guns. Paragon Software's Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional is a very big gun and deserves a place in your tool box. It can help yourepair and manage physical and virtual Windows workstations throughout their life cycle.

Installation

Hard Disk Manager comes in a single executable, which you can install on Windows 2000 Professional (Win2K Pro) and later, including Windows 8. Therequirements include Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 or later, an Intel Pentium or compatible 300MHz or higher processor, 128MB of memory, and a hard disk withat least 250MB of free space. Licensing is handled by a product key and serial number combination. Although not installed by default, the installationexecutable includes the GPT Loader for hard drives that exceed 2TB and the HotCore Driver, which enables Win2K Pro machines to back up and copy lockedvolumes.

Installation on my Dell Inspiron laptop took only a few minutes. Afterward, I looked through each menu. It didn't take me long to realize that this productis absolutely chock full of useful features.

As Figure 1 shows, the main screen is laid out with the hard disks logically displayed. A variety of information is provided for each one, including thetype of file system, volume size, partition size, used disk space, and free disk space.

 
Figure 1: Hard Disk Manager's Easy-to-Navigate UI

Right-clicking one of the disks brings up a menu of more than 20tools and options, which is another indicator of just how many features are available in this product. Just from this menu alone, you can:

I spent some time testing all the product's features and was impressed with the simplicity that the wizards brought to what could be considered complextasks.

Data Backup

In an ideal situation, you should have a separate hard disk to back up your important data. This protects you from a total hard disk failure and from "useraccidents," where a file is deleted or changed. However, most computers are shipped from the factory with only one hard disk. This is where the BackupCapsule comes in. It lets you back up the primary partition to a dedicated place on your hard disk. Although this won't protect you from a total hard diskfailure, it will protect you from user accidents. If the primary partition somehow becomes really corrupt, you can even boot from the Backup Capsule bypressing F1 (or another function key of your choosing). Creating a Backup Capsule on a 130GB drive with 40GB of data took about 30 minutes on my laptop andrequired one reboot.

To protect against total disk failure, you can choose to back up to another local disk, a network server, a CD-ROM, a DVD, or even an FTP server. Thesebackups can be scheduled to occur during system startup, at logon, daily, weekly, or monthly. I found the scheduling to be very feature rich. For example,you can schedule a daily backup with a specific start date, set it to reoccur every X days, and have it stop on a specific date.

Hard Disk Manager also includes classic backup functionality. Called Smart Backups, this feature can protect disks, partitions, email messages (MicrosoftOutlook, Outlook Express, or Windows Mail), media files (e.g., photos, videos) stored in users' folders, documents stored in users' folders, and more. Youcan choose to exclude or include specific file types. The backup wizard can run the backup immediately, schedule it for later, or create a script in theParagon Script Language. Saving a backup routine in the form of a script makes it easier to transport the backup job from one computer to another.

Partition Management

If you've been working in the IT field for a long time, you'll no doubt remember FDISK. This handy MS DOS utility lets you create and delete partitions ona physical hard drive. One pitfall of this utility was that once the partition was created, it couldn't be resized without first deleting, then re-creatingthe partition -- a procedure that ultimately erased all your data. Hard Disk Manager overcomes this limitation and lets you move and resize hard drivepartitions without losing any data. I successfully carved out a new partition and created a G drive using the built-in wizard.

Other Cool Tools

As I mentioned previously, Hard Disk Manager is full of useful features. Here are some of the other tools that you might find useful:

Missing Functionality

With all of the great features in Hard Disk Manager, I was surprised to find that it doesn't include a basic undelete utility. The advent of the RecycleBin has really helped users have "one more chance" before permanently deleting a file. However, after the Recycle Bin has been emptied or you remove filesby pressing Shift+Delete, the files are more difficult to recover. Although there are free applications available that can restore deleted files on yourhard disk, why not include this useful feature in a product as robust as Hard Disk Manager? This is a big miss in my opinion and keeps this product fromgetting a perfect score of five stars. However, even with this feature missing, I would highly recommend Hard Disk Manager to technicians looking for atool to manage and repair hard disks.