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Paragon Software Group, a provider of data security and data management solutions, announced the release of Hard Disk Manager 2010 for home users, available in two editions, Suite ($49.95) and Professional ($99.95). The software provides tools SMBs (small and midsize businesses) need to manage their hard drives, including partitioning, backup and restore, migration, optimization and defragmentation, hard drive disposal, boot management and system recovery.
The complete package is accessible from one interface, which the company said it designed with user-friendliness in mind. It allows users to migrate an existing drive or partition to a new one, as well as to different hardware. It is also possible to maintain physical environments and drives, in addition to a variety of well-known virtual environments and types of virtual drives. In addition, Hard Disk Manager 2010 is a disk management tool that provides full support for Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.
In addition to the all-in-one features of partitioning and backup/restore, advanced users of Hard Disk Manager 2010 Professional will also find tools for full-range maintenance for virtual machines. The software allows users to migrate to a virtual environment (P2V) and manage it offline (without turning on virtual machine). Paragon encourages small business users to utilize the P2V technologies to migrate from physical hardware to a virtual environment and make the operating system and all applications installed hardware-independent. Using the P2V function, the company argues businesses can make their old system bootable on any type of new hardware or partially different hardware than what it was originally configured for.
The Professional edition includes features such as the ability to change the cluster size of a file system, reducing wasted space on the hard drive, converting MBR (master boot record) dynamic volumes to MBR basic partitions and the ability to convert a basic or a dynamic GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk, a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk, into a basic MBR disk. Professional edition also includes synthetic backup, which allows users to change any property, such as merge a given differential image with its full image, split/un-split, compress/de-compress, etc.) of an existing archive without carrying out a physical backup operation.
Businesses that purchase Professional edition also get the benefits of cyclic backup, which establishes an automatic data backup that is fully compliant with the Set-and-Forget Backup Policy, as well as incremental copy functionality and a host of virtualization and migration features like P2V functionality and Connect VD, which connects a supported virtual disk to Paragon’s program for data management and transfer.
Late last year, the company released its latest disaster recovery, system migration and virtualization software program, Backup & Recovery 10 Suite. The solution mirrors the characteristics of Paragon’s Drive Backup Professional product line with a minimalist “set-and-forget” policy found in Paragon’s System Backup. The Suite offers recovery environments in Windows Native Mode, WinPE, Linux and DOS, provides virtualization support and includes support for Windows 7. Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Suite is available for $69.95.