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Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional

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Our Expert
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65 EXPERTS
43 YEARS
41,500+ REVIEWS
Anyone who manages Windows computers needs Paragon's hard disk management and repair utility, which has the best-chosen and most-reliable features for managing disks and recovering files.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional: Main Menu

Paragon's clean interface includes a spacious diagram of your disks and a Home menu that leads to its most-used features.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional: Resizing Partitions

Basic operations include resizing a partition using the mouse or keyboard. All potentially destructive operations require multiple confirmations before proceeding.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional: Copying Partitions

The Copy Partition Wizard is typical of the app's wizard interface, in which each step is carefully presented to avoid errors or confusion.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional: Virtual Disks

Virtual disk features include options to create disk images exactly suited to different versions of Hyper-V and VMware software.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional: Backup

Built-in features let you use virtual disks as backup images, features that work well, though we still recommend ShadowProtect Desktop as the best of all such disk-imaging apps.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional: Making Recovery Disks

You can create a USB-stick-based recovery boot disk from inside the program or from a separate Start Menu item. You can create either a Linux or Windows-PE-based recovery environment that provides the same functions in different interfaces. You'll need to download some development software before you can create the Windows-PE-based system.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional: Recovery Options

If you don't plan to use your network with the recovery disk, choose the option that tells the recovery disk not to try to connect to the network, and get rid of some annoying error messages.

About Our Expert

Edward Mendelson

Edward Mendelson

My Experience

I've been writing about software and hardware for PCMag for more than 40 years, focusing on operating systems, office suites, and communication and utility apps. I've specialized in everything related to word and document processing, including format conversion, OCR, and PDF apps. In my spare time, I build apps for Macs and Windows PCs that make it easy to run legacy operating systems (such as old versions of macOS and Windows) and work with legacy documents.

I've also written about technology for non-technical publications, such as The New York Review of Books. Before joining PCMag, I reviewed music and sound equipment for audio magazines. In my other career, I'm the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and write books about modern literature.

The Technology I Use

For work, I use a Lenovo ThinkCentre M901s desktop (one at home, one in the office) and a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 laptop. For everything else, I use an M4 MacBook Air and an M4 MacBook Pro. I also have an iPad Air and a closet full of obsolete ThinkPads and Macs that I use for testing and nostalgia. I still use an iPhone 13 mini because it's the smallest iPhone that Apple still supports.

My speakers are a mix of Bang & Olufsen and Sonos models, driven by a mix of tube-based and solid-state electronics and a WiiM Pro streamer.

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