dadiOH said:
Sorry, don't know, I use an ancient version of their Hard Drive Manager.
Did a test install inside a virtual machine.
- You get blocked on the install. It throws you at their web site to
dole out your email address which they then send you the product and
serial key via email. You have to wait for the email to show up before
you can continue the installation (assuming the email shows up since
there is no guarantee of delivery for email or that their process
functions correctly to generate the email).
- There is no cyclic backup where you can select to do differentials
with a full backup every Nth backup.
- The free version lets you save differential backups but YOU must
select the full backup on which it is based. That means if you schedule
this backup, all differentials are based against the same full backup.
Obviously the full backup gets old as you end up only doing
differentials against it. You would have to manually edit the backup
job to select a different full backup to start a newer chain of backups.
That also means YOU will have to do a full backup before you run that
differentials based on it. Personally I prefer an *automated* backup
schedule rather than me having to remember to do the backups.
- The free version doesn't come with any help. Instead they throw you
at their web site which obviously means you need Internet connectivity
when you're trying to get help on using their product. You then have to
wait until the link to the .pdf file eventually gets downloaded. This
saved all of 5MB from their 96MB download.
So they dropped the cyclic backup and haven't yet restored it. The only
advantage of Paragon's free offering over Macrium Reflect Free is the
inclusion of differential backups; however, that requires user
intervention to do a *new* full backup so you can select it in a
differential backup. Paragon's support of differential backups devolves
you into manual operation of the program, not really the point of a
backup program where scheduling ensures the backups get done whether you
remember to do them or not.
With differentials losing their advantage in Paragon in a comparison
against Macrium Reflect Free, you then have to consider other
advantages/disadvantages between these two freebies. There are some
reviews that compare the free backup products. This one is a bit dated:
http://dottech.org/featured/11628
Paragon still has some features missing in Macrium but you have to
consider if they are important to you. For example, how often have you
really needed your OS and host to shutdown after a scheduled backup has
completed? This article, as well as other comments I have seen, shows
Macrium is faster and produces smaller image files than Paragon;
however, I've also heard that restores using Macrium are longer than for
Paragon. Yet it's likely you will perform far more backup jobs than
restore jobs.
