Backing up your PC's hard disk is obviously sensible, but it's only when one of your drives actually dies that the message finally hits home.

Today, with most of us storing family photos, music, videos and other personal documents in digital format, itís more important than ever to protect our precious data.

More than a simple backup tool, Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 2008 aims to make managing drives and keeping your data safe as simple as possible.

The suite contains a set of utilities for backing up important files, migrating a system from one drive to another, keeping your hard drive healthy, rescuing data from damaged disks or securely erasing an old one.

Despite the range of facilities on offer, getting to grips with the package is easy. Everything is split into five refreshingly clear sections and backups can be created with just a few clicks, though the option is there to adjust levels of compression, exclude certain files or even span disc images across several CDs or DVDs if you need to.

In tests using Normal compression, creating a 33GB backup of our notebook took around 50 minutes. To keep things ship-shape, Paragon's maintenance tools let you analyse and defragment drives, and create standard or customised recovery discs, while advanced options cover resizing, copying, deleting and even undeleting partitions. Everything we tried here worked as expected until we got to the boot manager - our system refused to start once this was installed.

Thankfully, Paragon's support team got us over this hiccup but we'd suggest it either makes creating a recovery disc mandatory during installation, or at least forces users to make one before installing the boot manager.This glitch aside, itís hard to think of a more complete hard drive toolkit, and Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 2008 gets the thumbs up from us.