Paragon Drive Copy 11 Professional

Paragon Drive Copy 11 Professional is a time-saving data migration tool that will quickly transfer your operating system, applications and data to hard drives, SSDs, virtual machines and more.

If you've just bought a fast new hard drive, then, you won't have to reinstall Windows and your applications. Just point Drive Copy at the source and destination drives and it'll copy your programs and files to their new home, leaving you with a bootable drive that you can use right away.

The new drive is larger? That doesn't matter, Drive Copy will resize your partitions to fit. And unusually, this will even work if you've purchased one of the new 3TB hard drives. Many PCs will only let you see 2.2TB of the drive's capacity, but Drive Copy uses a layout called Retained GPT and a special driver to let you access the full 3TB, even if you're using 32-bit Windows (including XP) or a PC with an old (non-EFI) BIOS.

Another option allows you to migrate your hard drive contents to an SSD, even if it doesn't have the capacity to hold all your files (you're able to tell Drive Copy not to migrate particular folders).

It's also possible to turn your system into a virtual machine that you can then access in VMware Workstation/ Fusion, Microsoft Virtual PC or Oracle VirtualBox.

And bonus features include a basic set of partition management tools, a "scheduled copy" feature that allows you to back up individual partitions or drives, and our favourite, a bootable recovery disc. If Windows won't start for some reason, boot from this instead and there's a good chance that it could fix the problem and get your PC working again.

Note that the "trial" version is only a function-limited demo of the application.

The "migrate to SSD" option is awkward to use, but otherwise Paragon Drive Copy 11 Professional is an excellent tool with the power to handle just about any migration you might want to try