Paragon Software have released Backup & Recovery 2010 Free Advanced, a free-for-personal-use backup tool with a host of professional features.

The program allows you to create a backup image of anything from your hard drive’s Master Boot Record, to individual partitions, or the entire drive.  Backups can be full, or differential, including only the changes made since the previous backup for extra speed.  And you can save your backups to local or network drives, FTP servers, CDs, DVDs or Blu-ray discs.

As long as you’re not burning your backups to individual discs then you’ll appreciate the new scheduler, which allows you to set up regular backups, and have them run even when you’re not around.

And a Recovery Media Builder helps you create bootable USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs, that you can use to launch your PC and restore your last backup, if Windows will no longer start.  (But if your recovery problems aren’t quite that severe, don’t worry, you can also selectively restore just the files and folders that you need.)

The new (in this version) support for virtual machines is a particular highlight. Backup & Recovery 2010 Free Advanced is able to convert hard drives to virtual disks, with support for Virtual PC, VMware and VirtualBox formats.  And if you try this with a system partition, but find Windows won’t boot on the virtual disk, then their bundled P2V tool will patch the operating system to try and fix the problem.

And as usual with Paragon products, there are plenty of extras, including a decent set of partitioning tools that provide everything you need to set up and manage a new hard drive.

It’s an impressive list of features for a free product, then.  If you’re looking for a new image-based backup tool then Backup & Recovery 2010 Free Advanced must be the program to try first.