Through all this, the thing to bear in mind is that the whole shebang is completely free – which makes it very easy to overlook a few quibbles. The delay won’t be noticeable when you’re running regular backup tasks in the background, but it’s a frustration if you want to quickly refresh an archive before shutting down for the night. We ended up waiting 100 seconds for an uncompressed USB backup that other packages completed in a fifth of the time, and dialling up the compression to the maximum setting extended the wait by a further 83 seconds. Every time we kicked off a backup job, the software sat and cogitated for a good minute before starting to transfer files. Paragon Backup & Recovery is also a little on the sluggish side. If that makes you want to upgrade, be prepared to pay a steep premium: Hard Disk Manager Advanced comes as a three-PC licence costing £69. Most home users will survive without these features, but one convenience you might miss is the ability to exclude specific files and file types from your backups.

The commercial Hard Disk Manager Advanced package looks and works almost identically to Backup & Recovery CE, but adds email notifications and disk-to-disk cloning. Some other features are held back for paying customers. If you want the reassurance of offsite backups, you’ll need a workaround, such as using a sync service to copy your backups into the cloud, or mapping a drive to a remote server via WebDAV. One is cloud integration: Paragon doesn’t offer its own remote storage service, and there’s no direct connection to third-party providers. There are a few notable things the program doesn’t include. If you prefer, you can set the software to create VHD, VHDX or VMDK formats instead, allowing you to mount and browse your backups in Hyper-V and VMware – the trade-off being that neither compression nor encryption is supported with these file types. Whatever files you choose to back up, they’re stored as virtual disk containers in Paragon’s own PVHD format.

Paragon data recovery