Overall, however, the interface is clean, well-organized, and nicely walks you through creating a backup job. Normally, one-offs are taken care of by simply not creating a schedule. We also aren’t quite sure why there are separate options and wizards for creating single backups and those to be run on a schedule.

Using Backup & Recovery is simple, though it took us a few minutes to catch on to the less-obvious tabs that lead you to the various options and functions. Backup & Recovery, whether the paid or free version, doesn’t sport niceties such as cloning, a recovery boot partition, or backup via FTP or to online services. They aren’t necessarily the ones we would choose, but they’ll do for free. With the free version, you’re stuck with the four are provided by default. The $40 paid version of Backup & Recovery offers granular scheduling, with complete control over the type (full/incremental/differential) and allows you to save your settings as “strategies”.

The file transfer utility also supports direct writing to optical discs for archiving-the only function in the program that does.

Though not available in the free version, Backup & Recovery 16’s feature set is filled out with a simple file transfer utility for one-way mirroring of data. The builder sports user-definable network and driver options and will create USB sticks or ISO files. It also has the same advanced Windows PE recovery media builder. Once you spot these, and those elsewhere, you can navigate Backup & Restore easily. Notice the tabs at the bottom of the Window. All of the main imaging capabilities found in the company’s Hard Disk and Partition Manager are intact: imaging of entire system, whole disks, partitions, or sets of files you select. Design and featuresīeyond its signature VHD ability, Backup & Recovery 16 is a modernized, simplified version of Paragon’s well-established imaging technology and programs. Go to those stories for information on competing products and buying advice. Note: This review is part of our ongoing roundups of the best free backup software/services and the best Windows backup software.

Paragon backup and recovery 16 free