A decent backup utility
Since I made the post about Sysprep utility and backing up the system: once you prep your system, then what? You now have a generalized lump of data sitting in a box, ready to be ported out, but the moment you start it up, it’s going to rewrite all those details back into place.
Interrupt that process by booting up with Paragon in the interim.
A drawback to using Paragon is that the driver availability (or rather, lack thereof) can make you do extra work. Case in point: When you boot up the Paragon interface, it will look for:
1) The hard drive where your OS and data is located (Made by “AJAX” (hypothetical name, I’ll explain why later)).
2) Any removable media (Let’s say, in this case, an external hard drive you want to back up to, made by “ACME”).
3) Additional removable media where your supplemental drivers can be located (important point: keep reading).
Because Paragon, in my experience, has limited amounts of drivers bundled in with it, you might be hard pressed to find ways of manually installing drivers into it that will allow it to detect your hard drive and other removable media manually. This is a huge drawback. You might have to manually install the driver for your AJAX 123 hard drive that you already have, the ACME 321 hard drive you want to export your sysprep’d hard drive to, and then there’s that dreaded chicken-or-egg situation where you have the drivers stored on removable media---that cannot be read without the driver.
Okay, didn’t mean to scare you guys: The greater chance is that yes, Paragon will detect your AJAX 123 with no problem. Since Sysprep doesn’t really interfere with 3rd party software or raw files created by the user, you can download the drivers directly to the AJAX 123, store them in a designated folder, and pull them up from within. Just make sure you have the right make and model of driver, so do your homework, folks!