Paragon Backup & Recovery 11 Home

Paragon Backup & Recovery 11 Home is a very comprehensive backup tool with a vast array of professional backup and disk management features.

The program can back up a hard drive's master boot record, its first track, individual partitions or complete drives, for instance. It can also run file-based backups on the files and folders you specify. You can run a quick backup of your documents, music, videos, music or other media files. And there's even an E-mail backup, that will save your messages, accounts and address book (Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail are supported).

You're able to run full, differential or incremental backups, the latter including only new or modified files for improved performance. A scheduler allows backup jobs to be run when you're not around. And your backup files can be saved to local, external or remote drives, FTP servers, or burned to CD, DVD or Blu-ray discs.

Virtualisation support allows you to copy your entire system to a virtual drive (all the main formats are supported), ready for use in your virtualisation tool of choice.

Restoring data from backups is easy. You can selectively restore just the files and folders you need from within the program (even if they're held within a complete hard drive image). And if you purchase the program then you'll be able to create a Windows PE 3.0 boot disc to help restore backups even if Windows will no longer start (though it's not included in this trial version).

And there are a host of useful extras, from basic hard drive partitioning tools, to an Undelete Wizard, secure drive wiping option, hard drive sector editor, and more.

Paragon Backup & Recovery 11 Home is an excellent backup program, but if you don't need everything it offers then check out Backup & Recovery 2011 Free Advanced: it's similar, and won't cost you anything at all