Seagate DiscWizard offers a suite of tools to help you manage Seagate or Maxtor hard drives.

The program can create a complete image backup of your hard drive, for instance. This image can then be mounted as a temporary drive in Explorer, letting you browse it and restore just the selected files or folders that you need.

You're able to build a bootable recovery disc, too. If your hard drive becomes corrupted and Windows will no longer start, then boot from this instead, restore your last backup, and everything should be back to normal.

Or maybe you've bought a faster, larger hard drive? Seagate DiscWizard includes an option to add a new drive to your system. And you can then clone your existing hard drive by copying its partitions to the new disc, so you're able to boot from that instead.

As with any hard drive management tool, you need to be extremely careful about how you use DiscWizard. A single error - restore a backup to the wrong drive, say - could result in massive data loss. All Seagate DiscWizard functions are launched using clear and easy-to-follow wizards, though, so on balance you're probably safer here than with much of the competition.