New Partition Manager 11 from Paragon Software

Partition Manager 11

Paragon software just released a new well known product – Partition Manager 11. The product is a must have tool for  system administrators and power home users. The possibilities of such a product are enormous, because the product not only handles basic tasks as a creation, resizing, deleting partitions like some Open source tools (for example GPartEd) but also backup your System or Data partition into a local disk or network.

Supplied also as a bootable CD/DVD Based also on WinPE v 3.0 (in its Pro version only) which incorporates large number of drivers to be able to find your local disks which you want to work on.

There are 2 main versions which are destined to different types of users. There is a personal version and professional version of Paragon Partition manager 11 available. The corporate line has 2 more products: Paragon PM 11 for Server and Paragon PM11 for Virtual Server.

The Personal Edition.

The personal edition lucks some advanced features which most system admins would like to have.  One of the features which is not present, it's the WinPE  3.0 recovery environment, or the Synchronous backup of multiple volumes via Microsoft's VSS (Virtual Shadow Copy Service ). The personal edition does not enable to change cluster size or S/N change of your partitions either. It does not work with dynamic disks. It's up to you to see if such advanced features can be interesting or not in your working environment.

The Personal edition can handle backup operations too. If you need to backup your system or data partition and then have the possibility to restore individual files, the product can handle that.

The product works not only on Windows 7, but also on the 64bit versions of Windows XP or Vista. Supports

GPT-formatted hard disks (used in Windows 7, Vista, Mac® OS X and Linux) and the latest Linux-Kernel.

You are able to create Linux/DOS bootable media on a USB flash drive, CD or DVD for fast, reliable maintenance and recovery operations. The WinPE v 3.0 is available only in Pro version.

In the boot environment you can Fix crashed operating systems, perform partitioning operations, access and copy important documents with the recovery media after a system crash or hardware failure.

You can see All the features comparative features between the Perso and Pro versions – in this detailed PDF.

If you want some more detailed info and step-by-step you can find this PDF

Backup possibilities:

• You are able to create backup images during windows Execution, leveraging MS VSS and Paragon Hot Backup™ technology.
• Restore system and data even from bare-metal state.
• Restore partition with resize.
• Restore separate files and folders.
• Power Shield™ technology – resumes critical partitioning operations after a power failure.

You can get a free trial here:

You can buy your copy here.

The professional edition of Paragon Partition Manager 11

The Paragon Partition manager 11 professional version is destined for Enterprise usage and offers all the advanced features.

See All the features comparative features between the Perso and Pro versions – in this detailed PDF.

The pricing of the Pro version isn't that expensive as I would thought for this kind of product. It's EUR 49.95 per copy. You can Buy your copy here.  The personal edition sells for EUR 29.95 and lucks the advanced features. Fair enough. You can buy your copy here.

Some of the Pro features:

• Live imaging and migration for Win2K+ systems with two snapshot technologies, Microsoft VSS and Paragon Hot Backup™
• Partition Alignment Tool – a tool I presented last week and which align partitions to physical disk sectors to boost performance (up to 3 times) of storages.
• No hardware dependency with the next generation of Paragon Adaptive Restore™; our technology guarantees a Win2K+ system will boot on different computer hardware (P2P) by automatically injecting the required drivers and other actions crucial for this type of migration
• Restore at a granular level minimizes downtime if there's no need to restore an entire image; you choose only the files you want
• Suport of Virtual Machines – You can convert or prepare your Hard Disk for use in different desktop virtualization products like MS Virtual PC, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, and Sun VirtualBox
• Comprehensive recovery environments based on DOS, Linux, and WinPE 3.0 are available on CD/DVD/Blu-ray or thumb drives to quickly get systems back on track when they fail to boot. They also retrieve valuable information from damaged hard disks and accomplish bare-metal system deployment
• Defrag Features – 27 defragmentation strategies, MFT defragmentation and shrinking, low free space defragmentation (less than 1% of the free space required)
• Boot problems correction without restore (Windows system registry modification in the off-line mode, MBR, BCD, and the Boot.ini file correction, etc.)

You can get a free trial here.

You can Buy your copy here.

Paragon has now a very large scale of products which satisfy home and corporate users. Advanced features and innovations like PAT (partition alignment tool) can make the difference whether your company hesitates between two concurrent products.