Paragon Drive Copy 12 Professional is a time-saving data migration tool which makes it easy to 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 need 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 which you can use right away.

The new drive is larger? No problem, Drive Copy will resize your partitions to fit. And this works even if you've purchased a 3TB hard drives. Lesser copying tools will leave you only able to see 2.2TB of the drive's capacity, but Drive Copy provides a special driver which will 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.

Sometimes the new drive may be smaller, of course, particularly if you're migrating to a fast SSD, but Drive Copy can help here, too. You can tell the program not to migrate particular folders, until you're sure that everything else will fit.

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.

Paragon Drive Copy 12 Professional gains several useful new features, mostly relating to virtual machines. You can now mount a virtual drive in read-only mode to make sure it's not changed, for instance. Drive Copy can now resume operations on virtual drives, if they're interrupted for some reason. And, usefully, the program is now able to migrate a virtual system to a physical hard drive.

More generally, though, Paragon Drive Copy 12 Professional now fully supports Windows 8, although of course it still runs just as well under Windows XP, Vista or 7.

Please note, this "trial" version is only a function-limited demo of the application. You can view most options and areas of the program, but won't be able to physically carry out any migrations.