Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional

Year after year, Paragon Hard Disk Manager gets our Editor's Choice award as the best disk-management utility available, and year after year, the app gets progressively better. What you want most from a disk manager is reliability, which means that an app like this doesn't try to dazzle you with proprietary features that may leave you with an unusable disk if you don't have a copy of the app in an emergency. Instead, you want a program that manages industry-standard features in a fast and convenient way. Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 ($99.95) is the app I use all the time to manage my hard disks, and, except for one or two minor inconveniences, it always gets the job done with a minimum of anxiety and fuss—while rival programs have sometimes left me with inaccessible data and a racing heartbeatt.

Basic and Advanced Features
The app's range of features starts with basic partitioning—for example, resizing a partition or copying a one hard drive to another—through disk-wiping functions that use any of a half-dozen high-security erasing methods, and on to advanced backup and storage features that copy disks to "virtual disks" or manage Windows-Server-style Hyper-V virtual machines. Complex, potentially destructive operations like copying one disk to another are done through well-designed wizards that anticipate your likely choices but give you plenty of chances to fine-tune the app's options.

A Recovery Media Builder feature lets you create a Windows- or Linux-based bootable USB or CD drive for emergency use, or for use when copying or managing your system disk in ways that can't be done when you've booted into your usual system. And don't be clueless: the first thing you do after installing the app should be building and testing that emergency recovery drive.

You also get a Volume Explorer that lets you extract files from physical or virtual disks—especially useful when you can't boot to your usual system but you can use the emergency drive to copy files you need. And you get a well-designed wizard that copies an existing physical system to a virtual "guest" system for use either with Hyper-V (2008 or 2012 versions), Microsoft Virtual PC, Oracle VirtualBox, or VMware Workstation or Fusion on the "host" system. Similar functions are available through Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware, but Paragon's wizard is easier to use and has a wider range of options.

By default, Paragon's app saves virtual-disk backup images to Paragon's proprietary virtual disk format, but you have the option to save instead to a Hyper-V, VirtualBox, or VMware formats. An option in the latest version lets you back up only media files, mail messages, or other documents to virtual-disk format for easy read-only access to the files when you need them. I had no trouble backing up to Paragon's format, but for disk image backups I prefer the unmatched flexibility and long-proven reliability of StorageCraft's ShadowProtect Desktop, our Editors' Choice in disk-imaging software.

Paragon also uses proprietary features for functions that don't exist in any industry-standard way, such as an optional boot manager that supports up to sixteen different OSes, and which should probably be used only in special situations. Windows users will prefer Windows' elegant built-in boot manager, and Linux users will prefer the low-frills GRUB 2 manager (which can also manage mixed Linux-Windows systems), but Paragon's alternative seems (in my very limited testing) reliable and efficient.

Testing Paragon
I put Paragon Hard Disk Manager to real-world use recently in both my desktop system and laptop. My desktop had two SSDs in it, and I wanted to copy the partitions in both to a single, larger SSD. I temporarily plugged the new SSD into the SATA cable normally used by the DVD, booted up with the Paragon USB-stick recovery disk, clicked a few buttons, and waited an hour or so for 800GB to get copied to the new SSD. Afterward, when I removed the two old SSDs and plugged the new SSD in their place, the system booted normally with no fuss. While the copying operation was in progress, the app displayed messages that seemed to have been badly translated from Russian, but in each case, the message got across.

In my laptop, I used the app to copy the existing drive to one of the SSDs that I freed up on my desktop machine; this operation was equally smooth. On both the laptop and desktop, the only notable glitch (aside from those ungrammatical messages) was an "expected time" message that kept changing wildly, first predicting that the operation would take five minutes, then gradually increasing the time to fifty minutes, then abruptly dropping back to twenty-five minutes—and finally finishing in twenty minutes. I've learned to expect this kind of bad forecasting from disk utilities, and to leave plenty of time for the app to do its thing.

I also used the app from inside Windows to resize some partitions on my desktop system. As with other advanced partitioning software, the app did most of the work after a reboot, after the machine started up but before launching the Windows desktop. Once again, the "expected time" messages were all over the map, but the results were flawless.