Paragon Software has released Backup & Recovery 12 Home, the latest edition of its extremely capable consumer-oriented backup tool. And while the New Features list is a little on the short side this time, build #12 does benefit from support for incremental disk imaging.

This new addition means your backups can contain only data changed since the last increment, saving time and storage space. Which is presumably what Paragon mean when they slightly unclearly say that the technology “boosts efficiency of backup to the network storage up to 200%”.

This new release also includes Paragon’s latest backup engine, which should further improve backup performance.

The program supports all the latest hard drive technology, including AFDs and disks with more than 2TB capacity.

And Paragon also say the program now works under Windows 8, although their official blog post about this release only says it was tested under the old Developer’s Preview version. That’s a little out of date now, and we’ve seen others reporting problems in this area, so if you plan on installing the program on a Windows 8 system any time soon we’d recommend you test it very carefully.

Otherwise, though, the core features here remain excellent. Performance is great, you get multiple recovery tools to help you if Windows won’t boot, your archives can be encrypted, you can back up to FTP/ SFTP, helpful wizards make it easy to run common backup tasks (saving your Outlook setup, say), and there are a stack of useful bonus tools.

The price for all this remains the same at $39.95, or $69.95 for a family licence (which essentially means 3 PCs in one household).

And if you’d like to try before you buy, the Paragon Backup & Recovery 12 Home trial build is available now.