When you purchase a new PC, it will ship with the hard drive either pre-formatted as one large drive or segmented in to different drives. All good, if that’s the solution you wanted. Generally speaking, you’re stuck with however the PC manufacturer decided to format your drive. Partitioning and general drive management tools are fairly sparse within Windows and certainly not applicable to the average end-user.

Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager is a complete suite of disk management tools, offering everything you should need to partition, backup, create an image, clone and recover your existing drive. When you receive your new PC, the first thing you’ll want to do is to remove or extend the existing partitions. Paragon Hard Disk Manager makes this process easy through its easy-to-follow user-interface.

If you want to move across files from your old PC, the disc copying function with Hard Disk Manager will enable you to clone an old drive or drive partition. For instance, if you have a partition that contains your music, instead of spending time copying each audio file, manually, simply clone the partition to your new drive. Simple.

Once you start using your computer, you’ll have installed applications and important work files. It’s imperative that you make a regular backup of your data. You can manually backup your drive, schedule a regular backup and even create a differential backup so only the files you’ve amended since the last backup, will be backed up.

If your system suffers from a crash, getting data back on to your drive is also simple. You can also create a recoverable media, such as a bootable backup CD, that will enable you to boot in to the CD and restore your data, should you suffer from a Windows crash that prevents Windows from starting.

Note that the Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite has replaced the old 'Personal Edition' of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5. The Professional Edition, available here as a download, contains more advanced features than the Suite, such as additional drive partitioning tools.