Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 (Advanced) Free

[Taurus]

When I tried to download Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 (Advanced) Free, I was redirected to CNET's download area for the program. But when I tried to download from there, I was redirected to areas of CNET that I am not familiar with. I never did get the progam to download, but ended up being redirected to areas of CNET that I am very uncomfortable with. I then tried to download the program from Softpedia and went through a smiliar series of redirects and never did get the program to download.

I am very satisfied with Paragon Backup & Recovery 2011 (Advanced) Free and refuse to get caught up in the redirects when trying to upgrade to the 2012 version. Because of this experience, it is my opinion the the 2012 Version be rerated to the bottom of the pack. If a product can not be downloaded from the vendor's site, then Gizmo's should not recommend that product at all.

[Anupam]

Taurus, can understand your frustration with CNet and also the downloading problem for Paragon 2012.

CNet since long back have started to wrap the setups with their own download manager... and the only way to avoid that is to register on their site, and then download.

We at Gizmo's have already warned the users about this on this article :

http://www.techsupportalert.com/cont...-installer.htm

and wherever possible, in our reviews, we have changed CNet download links to alternative links, either to the home site of download, or, to another reputable site like Softpedia.

Paragon 2012 is quite easily available for download from Softpedia, here :

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...-Express.shtml

I did not face any redirects there, and I had downloaded Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 from there only.

Also, the Softpedia download is also good, since it gives a link which downloads from Paragon site only... something which I like... that is, to download software from their home sites.

I have noted down the download link for the file from the download link, and will pass it to you in PM, in case you still have difficulty downloading from the Softpedia link.

[Taurus]

Thank you Anupam. I know I've said it before, but it needs repeating, you sir, are a gentleman.

[Anupam]

Thanks for the kind words Taurus, and for your always generous appreciations .

Glad to be of some help .

Paragon Backup and Recovery has been a good software for me, reliable, and easy to work with. Its the first time I had tried imaging with PBR 2011, and have been very pleased with it.

So, just because of a download problem, it should not be considered to go at the bottom of the pack.

I always thought I would use Macrium if I ever turn to imaging... but crank's review made me try Paragon, and I haven't been disappointed at all.

I haven't tried PBR 2012 yet, although I have downloaded it. Will try later. Have kept the two versions for now, just in case PBR 2012 does not work as expected, although the chances seem less.

BTW, crank in his review at main site has also praised ToDo Backup, so I have downloaded that too.. may try it out sometime.

[sicknero]

PBR 2012 is great... been using it for a couple of months now and it seems every bit as good as 2011. The differences seem to me to be mostly cosmetic, except that verifying/checking the image now works, which it never seemed to do before.

I did use Macrium for a while, and found it very good, very reliable. But I must be a bit of a luddite as I never got used to running it from within Windows itself, and the free version has no option for imaging from a CD or USB drive. Also, the PBR compression routines seem a lot more efficient than in Macrium... the resulting files in PBR are way smaller than when using Macrium.

I'm posting here though because all the PBR versions I've had, have always had one issue, namely that loading seems to take forever... time to have a fag, make a cuppa, walk the cat and still come back before it's finished loading itself. I don't mean the actual restoring, but the initial loading of PBR from CD or USB.

I'm just interested to know if anybody else has found this?

Can't say it bothers me over much, as half an hour to restore a pristine system partition is still way better than the several hours it would take to do a full W7 re-install, update, and install all my fave apps.

[crank]

Thanks for your input, we all have some software that others think simple, but we just can't seem to get to make nice for us, at least I sure do, some applications appear to be designed orthogonal to how I think, facebbook being a particularly odious example for me, one that millions of kids have no problem with. I'm afraid I don't image to removables, so can't really say anything about that issue. It might just be the slowness of the media, is this with re-writable DVD? Those tend to be significantly slower than the straight DVD+/- R. And just wildly guessing, maybe the first disk has a lot of initializing and data-configuring up front to get through.

Thanks again and please keep coming back.

[sicknero]

Hello Crank...

if you're referring to my comment about PBR being slow, it's not actually the imaging/restoration stage that I'm talking about (I back up to a seperate internal IDE drive anyway).

I'm talking about just loading the PBR software from CD or Flash drive, which can take up to ten minutes sometimes.

Like I said it's no problem really, I was just curious to know if other people have found this too.

[crank]

I think we are on the same page, but still not sure, when you say 'load the PBR software from CD or flash, doesn't that mean you are in recovery, using the DVD or flash drive to boot the system? But that can't be because you back up to an internal HD, so I guess we aren't on the same page, are we even in the same book? 10 minutes is too long regardless of what book anyone is in, I know the software, when first started normally from within a system, does some extensive disk analysis, if there is anything a bit strange with any of your disks, or if you have a whole lot of them with many extended partitions, I am wildly guessing something like that might slow it down.

[sicknero]

Sorry yes, I mean the recovery ISO. It takes about 5 minutes to load on my x64 laptop, but about 10 on my x86 desktop PC (which to be fair is home-built and 10 years old now). The laptop has one internal drive split into 2 partitions, the desktop has 2 internal drives, neither of which are partitioned.

I usually run the Paragon recovery media from a multi-boot flash drive (created with X-Boot) but it seems to be the same when loading from CD. The stage which takes ages is after the Paragon boot screen, but before the screen where you select the module you want, e.g. image/restore, file transfer, etc.

It's only the partition image itself that is stored on an internal drive.

I don't know if it's a disk analysis thing ... there's no sign of disk activity, going by no LED or audible signs.