Paragon Drive Copy 8 Personal review

Speed up your backup procedure

4 July 2006 0:14 GMT / By Stephen Patrick

To anyone who has owned their current PC for well over 18 months, we bet you’ve lost track of the number of updates that’ll have been made to the OS, let alone drivers and other registry tweaks.

And did we mention the software you’ve installed and forgo where you’ve put the disks? If that sounds like you, then one way of making life a little easier it with a neat little utility that allows you to make a copy of you system setup, so should you have a problem and need to re-install everything, you won’t need to download all those updates again.

Drive Copy 8 doesn’t take up much space on your hard drive, around 50MB, and once you’ve installed it you’ll find a simple wizard driven interface that explains what is happening, so taking a great deal of the mystery out of the tasks.

The first tool is the Copy Partition Wizard, which essentially allows you to create partitions on the fly. You get the notion whoever’s job it was to write the popup boxes didn’t have English as their first native language as some of the messages are a little esoteric but you soon get to grips with how it works.

If you don’t really have the time to set it up, you can always opt for the One Button Copy mode, which as the name suggests takes all the grunt work out of the process. If you opt for the Copy Hard Disk mode you’ll be able resize drives and assign them exactly how you like them but in most instances, the one button method is just as effective.

It’s not only helping with your backup routine. If you want to install a larger disk into your PC but don’t want to waste time installing Windows again, this program will come in handy. There is an argument that when it comes to setting up a new drive, you’ll want a fresh install, so that you’ll also see a performance boost but sometimes you simply want to get on with it, which is what Drive Copy allows you to do. Considering it only costs £20 (inc. VAT) it’ll save time and effort enough times to pay for itself.

Verdict

If you’ve only one PC an are really concerned about backups, then the logical route is to setup a RAID 1 configuration on your machine.

However, if you’ve an older PC, it’s not an essential tool and what it offers you may only need once or twice in your average computer’s lifetime but if you want to cut down on maintenance time with your PC, this is one tool you’ll gladly pay for.

Score

Review Recap

Made by: Paragon
Price as reviewed: £20
The good: Simple interface, cheap
The bad: Confusing popups
Quick verdict: For streamlining your backup routine or simply moving partitions around it’s a neat little tool that works well
Score