Storage | News

Paragon Software Offers Free Backup Tool for New Windows

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/14/12

Storage management company Paragon Software Group has released a free backup and recovery tool for current releases of Windows Server 2012. Paragon Image Backup for Windows 8 and Server 2012 is intended for IT professionals and others who are exploring the use of Windows 8, the next release of Microsoft's Windows Server. That operating system was released to manufacturing on August 1; it's expected to be formally launched on September 4, 2012.

The Paragon release addresses the Resilient File System (ReFS), Microsoft's new file system that improves on NTFS. Among the improvements, according to Microsoft, is its focus on maximizing data availability, even with the existence of errors that would have previously caused data loss or downtime. With ReFS, if corruption occurs, and it can't be repaired automatically, the online salvage process is localized to the area of corruption, requiring no volume down-time. ReFS is also designed to work with dramatically larger files, data sets, and volumes.

Windows 2012 testers can use the free backup utility from Paragon to create a backup image of the system and restore it under Linux or directly on Windows.

Additional features of the tool include:

• Read-only access to unmounted ReFS volumes under Linux and Windows environments;
• Support for ReFS backup, restore, and browsing under Windows and Linux;
• Live Windows backup, to allow users to create an image-based copy of the whole disk system or separate volumes and place them locally, to CD/DVD/drive, or online;
• The ability to restore the whole backup image or only particular files under Windows or from the Linux/DOS recovery environment; and
• Additional maintenance functions. For example, the Linux/DOS recovery environment includes basic functions for initializing, partitioning, and formatting hard disks.

"For anyone interested in the latest Windows 8-generation family but having concerns about the system's safety, Paragon Image Backup for Windows 8 and Server 2012 ensures complete protection," said Konstantin Komarov, CEO of Paragon Software.

The backup tool is available for download free with registration at paragon-software.com.