Hard Disk Manager

ZERO STARS. It's inert on macOS 10.14 Mojave using APFS. I rarely run into an app that is impossible to install. This app is impossible to install. Support were prompt and friendly! Unfortunately, they forwarded to me a protocol for installing the app that had little relationship to reality. I blame bad management for such problems. From my experience, this doesn't even qualify as alphaware due to it being impossible to install. Plus, Support told me outright there is NO chance this app will be updated in the near future. They also pointed out that it will not work with macOS 10.15 Catalina or higher. - - Details: The installation process forces an endless (ENDLESS) loop of reinstallations followed by restarts. It's maddening and impossible to work around. Support has NO working solution. - - ∑ = DO NOT USE THIS INERT APP.

Worst support I ever experienced with any software or any type of product or service!! Arrogant and useless.

HDM, is a strange bird and less immediately useful than you'd think despite it's greater capability than Apple's Disk Utility. RAID support seems very thin, the incremental backups are not compatible with anything Apple (proprietary Paragon format!). What is there in HDM are file integrity checks (something like Disk First Aid and the now missing Fix Permissions routine). Had Apple not crippled Disk Utility to the point of making it useless in El Capitan/Sierra/High Sierra I'd stick with Disk Utility. HDM is an awkward but powerful attempt at a replacement. For the moment, expert users only though. Just configuring the interface to be readable is half an hour's work for a CSS designer. Why HDM has to be so ugly is a mystery to me. One attractive theme with small/medium/large typeface sizes (not all elements should be the same size of course, but they should be resized proportionally depending on your choice) would be much better than three themes with nearly infinite (but still inadequate: with larger typeface some columns remain too narrow to read all the info) customisation options.

Paragon NTFS kext is set and forget. This monster HDM is anything but. For backups I continue to prefer SuperDuper! (working in High Sierra!) which uses native Apple formats. Native backup formats give me great confidence I'll be able to access my backups in the future (Apple disk images). Who knows what the future will bring with HDM? Why Paragon had to create its own backup format is another mystery for me. Much too much world invented here syndrome in HDM.

The licensing system is a complete nightmare. I have 15 Paragon licenses for various products and I dread deploying a new license. The licensing is now only very painful (think dentist) rather than excruciating (think dungeon, medieval torture). Or maybe I'm just more expert in it. Pricing is fair, bundles are often available so big marks for selling at reasonable prices. With reasonable prices, these kind of copy protection mechanisms aren't really needed, especially for mission critical applications like disk utilities (do users really want to risk their data to an outdated or pirated disk utility, probably not).

2.5 stars for taking on a challenging task and at the very least not erasing all our data. If you check other disk utilities out there for Apple, only the very innocuous SuperDuper! (doesn't modify originals) and DiskWarrior don't have dozens of angry users waving pitchforks over lost data. I own both of those (and most of the others). Only those two get regular use, along with the benchmarking from Disk Speed Tools (the tool I use isn't a disk utility really but it's part of a suite one could use as a disk utility). Hopefully HDM will get better. v1.2.2 is already somewhat more usable and more powerful than 1.1.

Suggestion: copying the design of Apple Disk Utility circa Snow Leopard would be a much better start than this QT home rolled Slackware style look. Throw out the current UI and start over.

Does not install properly - and Paragon does not answer support mails I recently bought Hard Disk Manager as part of a software bundle but was not able to install it (Mac OS X 10.11.6). It continuously asked for downloading further components resulting in an error message and an endless loop. Several support requests to Paragon were ignored. Finally, I got an automatic e-mail notification, even with an Ticket ID but with no answer to my problem. Instead, I was provided a link for registering a personal account (what I did not intended to do). Obviously, Paragon does not take its customers seriously - buy their products at your own risk!

Do you want to take a substantial chance? If you change partitions using this software, you will be taking a chance. How significant is that chance? If the changes make your BootCamp partition inoperable and require reinstallation is that significant enough? I cannot use a broad brush and paint everyone into that corner, but it happened to me. So make your own judgment.

How about HDM's roadmap for support for Apple's upcoming APFS? That would be crucial to know for me before making use of today's MU Promo.

I know that HDM is probably way better than Apple's Disk Utility. But I still have so many questions about this. (1) Does it have full RAID support (all versions)? (2) Can I run scripts (pre-backup, post-backup)? (3) It has incremental snapshot backups, but does it work as a full replacement for Apple's Time Machine? (4) Can I incrementally backup to a NAS? (5) What about offsite backups? (6) There seems to be a cloning backup functionality, but is it really a full replacement for Carbon Copy Cloner? CCC is great in that you clone your running boot volume, it only backs up the things that have changed, and when you need to restore, you just boot into your clone volume and restore with CCC from there. Is HDM able to do the same? Judging from their tutorials it seems to be a bit more complicated, plus some caveats like iCloud problems after restore etc. Actually, I would love to have all that functionality in one software, a substitute for Time Machine, and a substitute for CCC, a substitute for Disk Utility etc. But Paragon's information is lacking. Anyone who has used the software and can answer some of my questions?

Needs Scheduled Backups, and RAID 0, at least

Hard Disk Manager, from Paragon Software, is undoubtedly the most complete disk-management solution I've seen. It's clear that Paragon has used everything they learned from the other utilities they create to produce a package that addresses almost every conceivable issue that might arise in disk management. Most utilities of this type can manage installations of OS X, some versions of Windows, or various flavors of Linux; Hard Disk Manager can handle them all, and provides backup and restoration functionality as well. And Hard Disk Manager can work with all types of drives, from the expected hard disks to thumb (flash) drives. It can even format and partition, as well as backup and restore, FileVault and Fusion drives. The utility relies heavily on contextual menus to access the various functions for physical disks and partitions, as well as for logical CoreStorage drives: creation, formatting, copying, and deletion of partitions; wiping--or shredding--of data or free space; redistribution of free space between partitions; volume backup using Paragon's patent-pending Snapshot technology, which provides options such as selective file/folder restoration and incremental backups which can optionally be merged with a parent backup; recovery of deleted data; repair of Windows boot issues; migration of a Boot Camp installation from one Mac to another; and even revision of Windows installations to conform to new, possibly incompatible, hardware. And no change is made immediately: all activities are queued for review and submission, so you have an opportunity to revise your changes before you commit to them. Though it may seem a small thing, I was impressed by the thought Paragon has put into the creation of this utility, providing an option to perform two extremely important functions for bootable partitions in one step: file-system-integrity check and scan-and-repair for bad disk sectors. I never could understand why creators of disk utilities forced you to perform two separate tasks to get this same result. And to "up the ante," Hard Disk Manager can perform these checks on currently booted volumes by "freezing" the OS while the checks are performed. This is facility and utility at its best. Paragon has provided incredible power at an extremely reasonable price, which equates to unparalleled value.