You don’t need special hardware or complicated software in order to back up and restore a network file server, just Drive Backup from Paragon.

This easy-to-use application uses disk-imaging technology to take backups of your data to any accessible drive. It also makes it easy to recover from a complete server crash simply by booting directly from the backup.

We tested the Small Business Server Edition of Drive Backup, designed for use with Windows Small Business Server, but a standard Server Edition (£212.66 ex Vat) and a multi-server Enterprise Edition (£425.52 ex Vat) are also available.

Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows are supported, with a workstation version also available.

The software looks and behaves in much the same way on all versions, with installation a matter of running the usual Windows setup routine, then rebooting the server.

Load up the easy-to-follow management console and you can take backups straight away, with wizards to guide you through this and other tasks along with facilities to take backups immediately or scheduled for unattended operation.

Differential backups are another key feature, the software saving time and disk space by backing up only data that has changed since the previous copy was taken. These can be messy to manage so there’s a neat synthetic backup option to create a single archive file by combining existing differential copies together. A central database helps.

Data can be compressed and encrypted during the backup process and there’s no need to shut down applications, with a choice of either Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service or Paragon’s own Hot Processing technology to handle active resources such as open files.

Backups can also be taken of dynamic disks and the disks resized when later restored, with similar resizing options available when using the included disk-copying tools.

Drive Backup can copy data to a wide range of devices including internal and external hard disks, CD/DVD burners and USB storage sticks. Network shares can similarly be used, plus it’s possible to create a specially protected partition on the local hard drive, referred to as a backup capsule, which can be used to boot and recover the server in the event of a disaster.

Performance will, of course, depend on the devices and amount of data involved. We took a backup of the 12GB boot partition on our test server, compressing the data and storing it on a remote network-attached storage (Nas) appliance, a procedure which took just 18 minutes to complete over a Gigabit Ethernet connection.

A full recovery took about the same amount of time, added to which we were also able to mount the archive as though it were a local disk to browse and restore individual files and folders simply by dragging with the mouse.

We found Drive Backup pretty easy to install and use, although the English is a bit quirky in places and we’ve seen better written manuals. We also found the need to explicitly confirm and commit changes each time we wanted to do anything. Still, it’s an affordable product that does what it’s supposed to and well worth considering if you’re in the market for server backup and disaster recovery tools.