https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/ en Fri, 07 May 2010 17:52:26 +0000 hourly 1 FeedWriter https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113516 Fri, 07 May 2010 13:52:26 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113516 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113515 Thu, 06 May 2010 12:20:14 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113515 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113514 Acronis True Image Home 2010 with Plus Pack, and StorageCraft ShadowProtect 4.0 Desktop. Acronis is frequently available on sale, so the price can be comparable. ShadowProtect Desktop (higher versions are available) costs nearly twice as much. TeraByte Image for Windows is cheaper, people like it, and it has a solid reputation, but it's more of a collection of utilities, and in my opinion simply isn't in the same league as the others. Paragon Drive Backup does include other utilities, but I'm primarily interested in the backup aspect. Each product has some features which the others don't. I've covered Acronis previously. It has good features, but Acronis has a poor reputation for code quality. Despite mike's gushing and fawning over Paragon, the main features in Paragon and Acronis are a poor imitation of features which ShadowProtect has had for years. In terms of features and reliability, personally I'd spend the bucks on ShadowProtect. It has truly amazing features, but there's a catch, thanks to Microsoft. It has various virtualization options which are great, but Microsoft licensing is very problematic for home users. Microsoft, being built on pure greed, sees multiple instances of your own legal OS on the same host PC as additional copies, each of which requires a license. It's like charging you money every time you open another Windows Explorer instance. So that may limit some of the best features of ShadowProtect for home users, as the virtual copies may deactivate. Instead of duplicating a subset of what's available on each product's website or in their help files, like Ashraf, I'll simply let those with functioning brains go to the websites, where you can find tons of information, videos, manuals, etc. It would be pointless to duplicate the contents of the websites here, and these are somewhat complex products with numerous features. Paragon Drive Backup is still a good giveaway, and although generally much weaker than ShadowProtect, it has particular features which ShadowProtect doesn't, such as support for Linux partitions, etc., which some users may require. I should also note that ShadowProtect 4 appears to still have some interesting and very useful features from ShadowProtect 3, but they're buried in and hardly mentioned in the documentation now, even though I think that they're important. #46, mike, your senseless bashing of the Microsoft Installer, used by everything of Microsoft and required for Windows Logo certification, is tiresome. #30 had a previous installation of Paragon Drive Backup which the current installer needed to uninstall, and for some reason a file was missing/moved on his computer. It sounds like the original installation was messed-up, but you never know, people use all kinds of crapware like registry cleaners and such. As I've stated numerous times, always extract the files from the GOTD .zip files (preferably with Window's own zip support) prior to installing or activating. Since Windows dumps everything into common temp folders (incredibly stupid), installations can get seriously messed-up from left-over junk from previous installations. I recommend using Window's own Disk Cleanup to clear the Temporary Files (just those, you don't need to ditch the rest) before and/or after installations (after is good to make sure that leftover crap doesn't interfere with automatic Windows Update). For finding files on your computer, which may not be indexed even if you have some form of desktop search, you can use Everything, which has oodles of features, but personally I don't like the resource consumption since I rarely need to find unindexed files. I like JAM UltraSearch, which is quick for a non-resident search program.]]> Thu, 06 May 2010 05:23:28 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113514 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113513 Thu, 06 May 2010 03:46:23 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113513 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113512 Thu, 06 May 2010 02:01:23 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113512 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113511 Thu, 06 May 2010 01:36:23 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113511 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113510 Thu, 06 May 2010 00:47:22 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113510 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113509 Thu, 06 May 2010 00:05:40 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113509 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113508 Wed, 05 May 2010 23:44:31 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113508 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113507 Wed, 05 May 2010 23:29:05 -0400 https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/paragon-drive-backup-9-5-professional/#comment-113507