There are only a couple of uses for a disk-cloning utility such as Paragon's Disk Copy 8 Personal: to migrate from an old disk to a new one, and to create a full backup for instant recovery should your main disk fail. The first task can be particularly handy, as otherwise you'll have to re-install Windows and all your applications from scratch.
The main improvements over the previous version are the wizards that walk you through the various tasks. There's a nice, friendly feel about the interface, which calmly tells you that tasks such as resizing partitions on the fly or creating and overwriting partitions (completely destroying any data on the destination disk) are nothing to worry about.
However, the language used belies this serenity, with terrible English leading to all sorts of confusion as to what's actually happening. We had a large section of our main disk partitioned off for a media library, but wanted to move it to its own larger disk. Drive Copy 8 handles this with no problem, even resizing the partition to fill the whole destination drive, but after selecting the media library partition on the intuitive graphical representation of our disk, the next wizard screen states, "On this page you can select hard disk and the place where to create a copy of the selected partition".
We were as lost as you, and clicking around on the bar graph-like representations of our disks didn't clarify things. What it means is 'click on the destination disk'. Drive Copy 8 will then fit the new partition to the destination disk, provided there's space. We were impressed by how smoothly the transfer went and didn't experience any errors in our many tests.
The One Button Copy function is much touted by Paragon, but we found it a bit scary to use. It automatically finds a blank disk to copy to, but that copy then starts after 10 seconds by default. We'd rather it waited for our input, as we wanted to check which disk is being copied to which and tinker with the copying options such as the proportional resizing of partitions. We quickly shirked the One Button Copy in favour of the standard Copy Hard Disk Wizard, which takes you through the process step by reassuring step. The language here is markedly more comprehensible than in the Copy Partition Wizard. Both bring about impressive results, with partitions copied and moved with no hitches.
But let's return to those two uses of disk-cloning software before you buy Drive Copy 8. Data security is just as well served by running two disks in a mirrored RAID 1 array. And if you're going to migrate to a new disk, you might consider reinstalling Windows and all your applications from scratch. Windows runs slower as time goes on, and the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard of Windows XP works very well.
If you don't have the time or inclination to spend a few hours reinstalling your applications, or if you really only want to move partitions around disks and resize them, Drive Copy 8 is a good and affordable choice. The language is difficult to understand in places, but once you've worked it out, it does the job.
System Specifications
DISK-CLONING SUITE Requires Windows 95 or above, Internet Explorer 5 or above, 300MHz processor, 128MB RAM, 40MB disk space
Author: Clive Webster
Computer Shopper Online