One is cloud integration: Paragon doesn’t offer its own remote storage service, and there’s no direct connection to third-party providers. There are a few notable things the program doesn’t include. If you prefer, you can set the software to create VHD, VHDX or VMDK formats instead, allowing you to mount and browse your backups in Hyper-V and VMware – the trade-off being that neither compression nor encryption is supported with these file types. Whatever files you choose to back up, they’re stored as virtual disk containers in Paragon’s own PVHD format. You have to set and remember your own key, but Paragon thoughtfully allows you to attach a password hint to each backup job, to help jog your memory if necessary. Encryption can be applied too, with complexity options going up to AES-256. Oddly, the middle setting very slightly increased the size of our test archive to 2.01GB, but switching up to maximum compression reduced this to a much leaner 1.9GB.

On that note, three levels of compression are provided.

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