Paragon Backup & Recovery CE — The Complete Guide: Image Backup for Home Windows PCs
Paragon Backup & Recovery Community Edition is the community version of Paragon’s backup tool for 64-bit Windows. It backs up whole disks, the operating system or selected folders on a schedule, and automatically removes old backups according to retention rules.
Paragon Backup & Recovery Community Edition
Paragon Software
Image backup of disks, the operating system and folders on Windows, with scheduling, retention rules and recovery media, for non-commercial use.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Image backup — a whole disk, the system partition or folders.
- Scheduling and retention — regular backups, with old versions cleaned up automatically.
- Archive mounting — open a backup as a drive letter and copy out a single file.
- Virtual disks — save to VHDX or VMDK as well.
- Boot media — restore from a WinPE environment when the PC will not start.
Who may use it for free
The licence is personal and for non-commercial use only: fine for a home or student PC, but not for a computer in an engineering office or for paid work. For business use Paragon points to the paid Hard Disk Manager for Business. Even the free edition leaves out disk cloning, partition management, email notifications and Windows Server support.
Related tools
For free image backup that is also allowed at work, limited to one job — Veeam Agent FREE. For open-source cloning and imaging from USB — Rescuezilla. For imaging and network deployment — Clonezilla.
Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE
Veeam Software
Image backup of a whole Windows PC, single volumes or folders, with bootable recovery media and bare-metal restore.
Get it from the vendorRescuezilla
Rescuezilla project
Disk backup, restore and cloning in a simple graphical interface from a USB stick, compatible with Clonezilla images.
Get it from the vendorClonezilla
NCHC Free Software Labs
Disk and partition imaging and cloning from boot media, including deployment to dozens of machines at once over a network.
Get it from the vendor
UrBackup
UrBackup project (Martin Raiber)
Client-server backup for an office network: file and disk-image backups of every PC to one server while they keep running.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
A good choice for scheduled backup of a home or student PC. In an office, pick a different tool or buy a licence.