Anderson2 said:
Having just suffered a hard drive crash I thought to report my experience for the benefit of others and solicit suggestions. My OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit and I had 2 Free backup software products installed on my PC: Paragon Backup and Restore 10.2 and Macrium Reflect Free edition.

Paragon's backups take much much longer (by a multiple) than Macrium. More importantly the Rescue disk created by the Paragon Free version did not work correctly for me. In its "normal mode" it just loaded and then went nowhere. It did work in its "safe mode" option but was unbelievably slow. Using the Rescue disk in safe mode, the disk scanning took forever (minutes) and the only way to know it was still working was that the mouse froze, limiting my options to waiting or a hard reboot. Everything else took forever including selecting the archive to restore and the restore itself (several times Macrium's restore time).

Macrium's reflect was much faster for me. Its rescue disk worked flawlessly and booted right up. Similarly the archive selection and restore was much faster though I could only restore one partition at a time rather than set it to restore the entire disk image I had created. On the con side, the rescue disk I created from it only had a restore capability. It could not be used to backup and thus it was not possible to create a "bare metal" (without being in Windows) backup and restore of a hd. Paragon had that capability but its slowness - maybe because I was forced to use its "safe mode" - made it unbelievably tedious.

The question that occurred to me was the following: Was Macrium so much faster because it skipped important steps or was it just more efficient? Conversely, was Paragon's slowness merely inefficiency or did Paragon just check more things and thus was more secure? I do not know.

Bottom line: Paragon's bare metal capability was a plus but it slowness made it barely useful for me because one was never sure if the software had stalled or just needed forever to get to the next screen.

My experience with the Free versions only. Would like to hear more knowledgeable opinions.
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