Most of us use our computers daily, but few of us backup our data on a daily basis. What happens if you spend an afternoon working on a professional project that is due within the next 24 hours, only to find a power failure results in you losing important data?

There's a likelihood that you wouldn't be able to restore this information and you'd have to start again from scratch.

Protecting your system is relatively easy. You can schedule a backup so that it backs up your important files at either the end of every working day or week. This can be an automated process so it all happens overnight and your system goes to sleep, once the backup is complete.

Paragon's Drive Backup is a backup tool that will backup an image of either your entire hard drive or a partition.

Better still, with the new Hot Backup function, you'll be able to backup your data whilst you're still working on your computer, with minimum impact.

If you find you have a problem and you need to restore your data, you can restore from a backup image at any time, without requiring you to install further software.

The new Paragon Drive Backup 9 now enables you to backup files and folders, rather than your entire drive, exclude certain files or folders from a drive backup and also restore your drive to a different drive or system, if necessary.

Note that there's an alternative download that supports Vista 64-bit.