Comparison of "Paragon Hard Disk Manager 16" vs. "Acronis True Image 2018" Backup / Imaging

This article contains a comparison of my experiences with 
"Paragon Hard Disk Manager 16" (Paragon) and "Acronis True Image 2018" (Acronis)
backup / system imaging software.

This article does not compare all their features.

There are already many other sources / reviews where the features are listed side by side.
However, these overviews lack descriptions of specific limitations in daily use or of errors.
After reading a lot of such reviews, I decided to test these two programs as the two most promising.

With this short report I am documenting the main findings for myself and hope to save you some time.

What I can tell for now is, that both Paragon and Acronis work:

• The creation of "Image Backups" and restoring several files from these Images worked.
• I could even create virtual maschine disks from the "Image Backups" of my Windows 10 notebook and start this image on a VirtualBox unter an Ubuntu Linux host.
• After a bigger problem with my Win 10 notebook, I could restore it from a Paragon "Image Backup".

I read a lot of bad comments about Acronis that I could not confirm until now after two weeks of dally backups.


1. Rescue Media: Image Creation of a BitLocker encrypted Disk

• Paragon: Is able to create an Image of a BitLocker encrypted internal Hard Disk. But the bit locker must be previously temporarily stopped from Windows. After the Image is done, BitLocker can be resumed. If the encrypted disk is an external disk - protected by a password - is seems to be possible without previously stopping BitLocker. 
• Acronis: Does not support this.
• Since both can backup / "create images" of encrypted disks from the running Windows, this criteria is not very relevant for me.

2. Rescue Media: Keyboard Customization to own Keyboard

Both products creates a WindowsPE rescue media. And the default keyboard layout is English. If you do not use an English keyboard, it is important to be able to change the its' layout in order to match with your keyboard. For example, if you need to enter a password in order to access a network drive (your NAS - for example - containing your disk Images) from your rescue media.

• Paragon: Does not support this. I have opened a service request and they simply answered that I have to accept this as it is.
• Acronis: Describes how to change the layout.

3. Support Quality

• Paragon: They tell that they will give an answer in max. three days and they kept their promise. I opened six service requests in my first week of tests and I always received an answer before the three days. Five of the answers were good (the only one I did not like was about the keyboard customization in WinPE).
• Acronis: I can not tell, because I had no issues until now.

4. Incremental / Differential Backup to Network Target

• Paragon: Does not support this. In the documentation it is written, that only full backups are supported to network targets.
• Acronis: Works without problem

5. Active Protection Against Ransomware

• Acronis: Works. When I built my App, after installing Acronis, it warned me about suspicious behavior of javac and if this was Ok. So, Acronis detected that my java compiler was trying to modify a lot of files.

6. Testing from within a VirtualBox Client

• At the beginning, I tried to test both software from within a VirtualBox client.
  This worked, but I had some difficulties in creating the rescue media and accessing network clients, specially with Paragon.
• When running on a real computer I had no such difficulties any more.

Summarizing

First I have bought Paragon because of a good promotional price and because "it saved my computer" once.
But after having detected several small bugs and especially because of point 4., I decided to buy Acronis.

Point 4. is crucial for me, because I do not want to permanently "mount" my NAS in order to avoid that some ransomware can access it.

Update on 04.02.2018
After re-testing the Backup again today, the Acronis Version 2018 to Build:10640, Acronis is again able to prevent the computer from going to sleep during the backups.