There are generally two types of disk management program: those that copy and restore disk images for backup and security, and those which can re-partition disks so you can create and resize logical drives on them. Paragon's Hard Disk Manager handles both operations in a single package.
The 2009 Suite includes a small front-end menu which breaks down its functions into backup and restore, maintenance, rescue and recovery, wiping and 'advanced', the latter accessing the Hard Disk Manager itself. There's a lot of Wizard support within the program, so many of the regular functions, such as partition management, backup of disks and files and copying, are easy for anybody to use. If you want to work at a more detailed level, the Hard Disk Manager offers most of the extras you could want.
The main Hard Disk Manager runs under Windows, but this is really just to set up tasks. Once you've established what you want to do, most of the work is done without Windows running, as the software resets and uses a small Linux runtime to support itself. This is slightly old-fashioned, particularly when functions like file defragmentation are often run directly under Windows by rival applications.
New features of Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite include file-level as well as partition and disk backup and the ability to exclude selected files and folders from a backup image. You can build a rescue image on a USB drive, as well as on CD or DVD, and there's support for Blu-ray discs, too.
There's improved support for solving problems with Master Boot Record (MBR) and Boot Configuration Data (BCD) errors and much better support for Vista. The program now handles 64-bit as well as 32-bit Vista and claims to be able to restore a Vista disk image to completely different hardware.
Unlike a previous version of Hard Disk Manager, which claimed we had used 2048GB of an 80GB hard drive, the 2009 Suite has its act together and correctly reports space used and available.
There are still some anomalies, though. When defragmenting a drive - which incidentally has no reassuring progress display showing storage units being shuffled around - the program reports the time left and the time used identically all the way through the process. This doesn't affect the outcome of the defragmentation, but as we've said before, a program which can make fundamental changes to your drives needs to maintain a high level of confidence. Errors like this don't help.
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