Paragon Backup & Recovery 16 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 disc.

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 recovery disc to restore your system drive even if Windows will no longer start (though beware, that is not possible in this trial version - don't rely on it as your main backup tool).

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. And there's more. You can create incremental disk images, helping to save backup time and storage space; you get the latest backup engine, for even better performance; and it supports the very latest hard drives, including AFD's and hard drives over 2TB in size.

Modern technology enables a team to operate in different locations across your company and the world. If you’re a software developer, there’s no reason why you couldn’t pick the best programmers based in Germany, document writers from the UK, whilst your graphic artists could be based in the States.

The problem is bringing these people together. You need a system where your team or teams can share files and information, make sure that no-one overwrites someone else’s work and keep a collection of previously updated files, so you can quickly reverse back to a previous revision, if necessary. Doing this on your website requires you have the relevant versioning technology and that it will work across various operating systems. A versioning tool that works fine on Windows may not be suitable for OS X.

Dropbox is an online sharing tool that enables you to select the files you want to share and synchronise with other users, then simply upload them to the remote site. That bit is done automatically, so you don’t need to worry about having to upload the files manually. You can share folders and collaborate with other users on the files within these folders. Versioning will stop work being overwritten.

You can just use Dropbox on a personal level, too. If you own a desktop computer at home, use another at work and a laptop when you’re away from the office, simply use DropBox to synchronise your important files across each machine. You can also access your Dropbox files from the web, if you need access from a temporary host PC.

Better still, setup your software so they write preferences to your Dropbox folder, then sync these settings and preferences across your computers, enabling you to have the same setup across your desktop and laptop or PC and Mac, plus access from your smartphone.

Dropbox will limit you to 2GB of free online storage (and you can purchase more, if required) and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

New in the 36 series (see release notes for more):

- Regularly updated with many improvements and fixes.