Paragon Backup & Recovery
Wayne Williams still remembers the day his work disappeared in a puff of smoke. He now protects himself using this free tool
Back in 2005, my work PC started making a weird grinding noise, and yet it continued to work fine. Complacently, I assumed the sound wasn’t a sign of a major problem.
But a few days later something inside the case shorted and fried the motherboard and everything attached to it, including the memory and hard drive. This was long before we could back up data to online storage. Because I’d never got around to setting up a scheduled backup, all my data – work and personal – vanished in a puff of smoke. Literally. It took a week before the metallic burning smell abated.
Since then, I’ve backed up continually using the Community Edition of Paragon Backup & Recovery (free from
www.snipca.com/39440), an approach that saved me when ransomware attempted to take over my PC in 2013.
When you run the program, it prompts you to choose a ‘Backup strategy’. Click the ‘Backup is not scheduled’ link and turn the schedule on. This can be when an event happens (such as when the computer wakes from sleep), monthly, weekly or daily. I opt for daily, and because I leave my computer on all the time I set it to start at 1am every day (see screenshot below left).
Next, you need to choose the type of backup – full, incremental (backs up only files that have changed since the last backup) or differential (targets files that have changed since the last full backup). The backup screen lets you choose where to save your data, which in my case is to a Seagate 2TB portable USB drive. I’ve decided to set up a full backup, then incremental ones for two weeks, before running a new full backup again.
I also use the program on one of my laptops and for this I run full backups only. Why? Because this is where I install new software – including potentially risky programs – and make experimental changes to Windows. Having a full backup lets me roll the entire laptop back to the state it was in before I made the changes.
Restoring from a full backup is quicker than an incremental or differential one. The only time I need to make fresh backups on the laptop is after I’ve installed new programs I want to keep, or following Windows (or software) updates. Even then I have previous full backups I can revert to if something goes wrong.
Restoring a full backup requires the same steps as restoring any type of backup. Click ‘Restore’ in the File tab at the top, then ‘Restore volume’ on the left. Click ‘Next’, then select your backup drive in the box that appears - my Seagate drive is highlighted in our screenshot above.
I’ve also created recovery media that I can use to get back into Windows if there’s a problem. Click the Settings cog at the bottom and you’ll see a Recovery Media Builder option which is where you can create a bootable environment on a USB stick or as an ISO file.
In the dropdown menu, Windows 8 and 10 users should choose the ADK (Assessment and Deployment Kit) mode. For earlier versions you’ll need WIM (Windows Image). If you don’t have an ADK package installed, Paragon will tell you where to download it from.