If you've taken the sensible step of upgrading your PC with a solid state drive, you'll face a bigger challenge than just installing the drive: You'll have to transfer your operating system and files from the old drive to the new.
Paragon Drive Copy might have the solution. Its nerdy interface will lead you through the steps for cloning an entire hard drive, copying just a partition, creating a virtual disk and more. Major jobs such as copying an entire drive can be scheduled so that they're done when the PC isn't being used. The cloned drive can be copied to a portable drive _ a USB thumb drive will do if its capacity is big enough _ and used as a boot drive on any other Windows PC.
Solid state drives tend to have less capacity than traditional hard drives. Paragon Drive Copy knows that and helps separate the operating system to the new drive while sending user files to different drives. At that point, essential files can be copied to the new drive.
Or so the promotional materials gush.
In practice, Drive Copy is difficult to understand and even more difficult to use. For example, in the cloning process, it gives you three choices: "HDD raw copy," "partition raw copy" and "create new EFI boot entry for destination drive." That stopped me in my tracks. The explanations for each option were as confusing as the options. You have to have a working knowledge of partitions, volumes and other terms that simply are out of range of most people's understanding or interest. Oddly, I couldn't make a boot disk on a DVD disk.
Where Drive Copy is nerdy, Acronis True Image, a similar program that I reviewed a few weeks ago, is much more user-friendly. It does not assume that you know what a hard disk partition is. And it does far more than clone drives. The Acronis software handles backups to external drives and the cloud. Files and folders can be selected for backups, too.
If you like your software on the nerdy side, you'll have a field day with Paragon Drive Copy. But if you like your software to be user-friendly and want more than drive cloning, Acronis True Image is the better choice.
Paragon Drive Copy costs $40 at www.paragon-software.com. Acronis True Image starts at $70 (www.acronis.com).
