Don't be fooled by personal' in the name of this powerful drive-imaging soft¬ware. Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Personal Edition looks as if it's designed for personal use by the kind of people who manage enterprise IT systems. You may prefer this package if you're comfortable with menus that let you back up your hard drive's Master Boot Record and aren't terrified by an option to back up the first track, or if you want to manage multiple backup images from a single archive menu.

And if you're a techie needing to restore your system from the program's Linux based emergency boot CD, you'll thrill to the knowledge that you can open a command line and perform advanced surgery on your drives and files using Linux's most arcane tools. Home and SOHO users who don't want to be both- ered with technical details, however, should probably choose something else for their personal drive-imaging prod¬uct. As a fairly experienced user, I could happily live with this product for drive backups, but I'll stick with Shadow Pro¬tect for its superior speed and easy-to¬use Vista-based emergency CD

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I was a lot more impressed with the full-fledged Linux-based disc, which managed external drives without getting confused by multiple partitions on the internal drive the way the True Image Home Linux-based disc did. You'll need some experience with networking and an understanding of basic Linux to use all the features on the full-fledged Paragon emergency CD, and some of the disc's menus-especially in its networking setup-aren't for the fainthearted.

I was very impressed with Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Personal Edition, and I think any system administrator would be glad to have a copy of its Linux¬based emergency CD. While it may be a bit intimidating for less-savvy users, this highly reliable and powerful utility is a good choice for those who need advanced capabilities. It's a close second to our Editors' Choice, the more broadly appealing ShadowProtect Desktop.