We decided to take the next step in our development and present you with our most expected product – Paragon Hard Disk Manager for Mac! Most of you are already familiar with Hard Disk Manager for Windows or even have it installed on your PC. Now, we release Paragon Hard Disk Manager for Mac!
We developed a product that includes all the tools the OS X user needs. Everything from what’s OS X is missing plus comprehensive functionality to easily manage your OS X systems, so once you start using HDM for Mac, you wouldn’t have to run across the web searching for additional programs to successfully manage your Mac. HDM for Mac covers it all!
Enjoy this new powerful Mac solution!
System Integrity Protection in OS X 10.11
El Capitan support;
Sector-level backup for best perfomance and backup/recovery speed;
Move, resize, undelete partitions and modify their properties;
Migrate Windows OS from one Mac computer to another;
Format volumes in any of the common file systems (NTFS, HFS+, ExtFS, FAT 16/FAT 32 and exFAT);
We would like to thank our beta-testers and everyone who supported the project – with your help we were able to gather the most valuable feedback and develop a great new product!
We frequently talk about recent security threats, including the new Trojan horse called “Locky” that encrypts your information forever, making it impossible to read.
Unfortunately, Locky is not the only virus that can cause problems for your operating system. There are many other types of viruses which can silently infiltrate a computer without you even noticing it. One of the most common and easiest ways of accessing your system is through an external flash or a hard drive.
There are a number of software solutions to help prevent such infection, as well as a radical and 100 percent secure hardware method. You can protect your USB ports from an unauthorized access for a short period of time simply by disabling the ports.
If you are using Windows…
All that you need is Notepad and an administrator-level account.
First, create a new document, then copy and paste the following text:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR]
”Start”=dword:00000004
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR\Enum]
”Count”=dword:00000000
”NextInstance”=dword:00000000
Save the file in the desired location and name it usboff.reg. Be sure to save it with the .reg extension and not .txt, or this trick will not work.
Now repeat the process, changing only two parts: in the line ”Start”=dword:00000004 change the 4 to a 3 , and then save a new file named usbon.reg.
Done!
Now when you want to disable the USB port, simply open the usboff.reg file and confirm the change. This will block any external drive plugged into your PC from working. As you might have guessed, opening and confirming the usbon.reg file will do just the opposite, once again enabling the USB port.
Assuming you are the only one with administrator-level access to the computer in question, no one will be able to change these files except you.
Now for the Mac
This trick is slightly more complicated than on Windows.
OS X 10.11 El Capitan brought with it an additional level of security for your Mac: System Integrity Protection (SIP), which prevents system-related files from modification. Even if you have an administrator-level account, you won’t be able to make changes to these files.
Apple’s new protection policy may have good intentions, but it clearly doesn’t help with our mission to disable USB.
NB! If you are using a USB keyboard or mouse, please don’t attempt this trick! You won’t be able to use these input devices, requiring an alternate method such as Bluetooth.
You can disable SIP by booting into recovery mode. Restart your Mac and hold Command+R as it boots.
From the menu, select Utilities > Terminal. In the Terminal window, type csrutil disable, press Enter, then restart your Mac.
To reenable SIP, launch Terminal while in Recovery mode, but this time type csrutil enable, then press Enter and restart.
But there’s an easier way – download and install the new Paragon Hard Disk Manager for Mac®, which provides, on top of other useful functions, one-click SIP disable feature.
When your SIP is disabled, do the following: open Finder and select Go -> Go to Folder from the menu. Copy and paste the /System/Library/Extensions path into the field and look for two files located there:
Move these files to the Desktop or other location, but be sure to keep them somewhere safe — you’ll need them to enable your USB ports again!
These small tricks can help you protect your information from being stolen or damaged. If you are interested in more advanced and useful features to protect your Mac, try our new Paragon Hard Disk Manager for Mac, a powerful disk management utility for OS X, featuring:
System Integrity Protection in OS X 10.11 El Capitan support;
Despite its name, this multilingual product supports all OS X versions up to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard!
Paragon NTFS for Mac eliminates boundaries between Mac and Windows operating systems, delivering full read and write support for NTFS-formatted drives on OS X. Paragon NTFS for Mac achieves the speed of native drivers and is the industry’s fastest solution for Mac users who want to share data between Mac and Windows systems, so that the user doesn’t even notice on which platform their files are.
Paragon NTFS for Mac Yosemite Free is based on Paragon’s proprietary Universal File System Driver (UFSD) technology. Paragon UFSD provides full access (read/write, format, etc.) to volumes of the most popular file systems under all popular platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and DOS).
Availability:
Paragon NTFS for Mac Yosemite Free is available for download absolutely free of charge! For Mac users of El Capitan, the commercial 14th version is available at $19.99.
For other Mac products, please visit Mac ToolBox Portal.
New SDKs greatly simplify the creation of storage management apps for Android and iOS, and make it easy to add USB storage functionality to other apps.
USB storage is generally underused in mobile apps, even though there are various situations where it would be very convenient for users. Examples include on-the-go backup without relying on mobile data or Wi-Fi hotspots, and giving copies of photos or videos you’ve just taken to someone else without having to upload them. If you want to take movies on a trip to watch on the plane or in your hotel, for example, it’s much easier to save large media files on a flash drive, and this also avoids cluttering up the device’s limited internal storage.
Mobile OSes are beginning to incorporate USB storage support, but that support tends to be inflexible. This feature only came to Android in version 6 (Marshmallow), and that implementation only supports FAT32. That’s a problem for developers who want to produce apps that run on the majority of Android phones and tablets, and an even bigger one for those planning to create cross-platform apps. Furthermore, FAT32 imposes file-size limitations that can be inconveniently restrictive when dealing with large files such as HD and 4K videos.
Paragon Software’s new UFSD SDKs help fill this gap. Available for iOS (iPhone 5 and later, iPad 2 and later) and Android (version 3.0 and later), they abstract and implement support for multiple partitioning schemes (MBR, GPT and APM) and file systems (NTFS, HFS+, FAT32, ExFAT and ExtFS).
The UFSD SDKs will be of particular interest to storage vendors, as they can bundle Paragon’s UMS service and other Paragon FS drivers with portable USB storage products to ensure compatibility and interoperability with any OSes including iOS, Android, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Similarly, ISVs can use the SDKs to simplify the development of Android and iOS apps supporting multiple brands of mobile USB storage.
Since iOS provides a very limited support for external storage and only allows access to images stored on digital cameras via custom Lightning to USB adaptor, storage vendors entering the iOS market need a companion app that would support their storage media’s file system. Naturally, each vendor’s app only supports its own storage brand.
To provide a real-life example of how the UFSD SDK can be used, Paragon Software has developed a plug-in https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paragon.tcplugins_ntfs_ro that adds USB storage support to the well-regarded, 4.5 star average rated, Total Commander file management app for Android. The plug-in has already been downloaded more than 400,000 times, which clearly demonstrates end-user interest in this capability.
A demonstration of a sample iOS app using the iOS UFSD SDK can be seen via YouTube:
Paragon NTFS for Mac 14 is the industry’s fastest driver giving OS X full read and write access to Windows-formatted NTFS partitions. The new version is fully compatible with Apple’s new operating system OS X 10.11 El Capitan, which was launched yesterday, and still supports all versions back to 10.8 Mountain Lion. Internal tests show Paragon NTFS for Mac 14 is the only solution on the market to match the file transfer speed of Apple’s native driver on SSDs.
Paragon NTFS 14 for Mac achieved 700MB/sec (write) and 800MB/sec (read) on the internal SSD of a MacBook Pro. It also performs as well as HFS+ with external storage: 250MB/sec write and 240MB/sec read on a two-SSD RAID device, and 210MB/sec write and 210MB/sec read on an ordinary external drive (2TB USB 3.0 Seagate Expansion Drive 3.5″).
To ensure a higher level of security, El Capitan delivers a new protection feature. System Integrity Protection prevents modifications to certain system files, folders and processes. This protects components on disk and at run-time, only allowing system binaries to be modified by the system installer and software updates. Code injection and runtime attachments to system binaries are no longer allowed. Paragon NTFS for Mac 14 is fully compatible with Apple’s new security policy ensuring fast, hassle-free and safe access to NTFS partitions from OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
Once the program is installed, the user can get started right away: conveniently navigate contents and read, edit, copy or create files and folders. The program guarantees advanced support of NTFS file systems and provides fast and transparent read/write access to any NTFS partition under OS X 10.11. Paragon has been the leader in cross-platform storage software for 20 years, delivering proven maximum performance, stability and security for cross-platform work between Mac, Windows and other operating systems.
Key functions:
Full OS X 10.11 El Capitan support.
Ultra-quick read/write access to NTFS files in OS X El Capitan.
No limit to file or partition sizes (within NTFS and OS X constraints).
Supports special NTFS functions in OS X El Capitan such as resource forks, hardlinks, symlinks and file permissions (POSIX file attribute).
The transfer rate during file operations on NTFS partitions is just as good as it is for operations on native HFS partitions.
Unparalleled stability – even during peak system utilization!
Simply install it and go to work. No further system adjustments are necessary once it has been installed.
When working with media files or documents in Mac, you need access to the high performance of your system regardless if the files are located on the Mac’s HFS+ formatted volume, or in Window’s NT File System. Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X 8.0 is the only NTFS driver on the market that provides full read/write access to NTFS with the same high speed as native HFS+ files. The built-in “HFS+ for Windows” completes an effective two-way communication channel between Mac® OS X and Windows.
As always, thank you Tekzilla, Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont for showing our products to your viewers!
Every Mac has a backup utility called Time Machine, but given the opportunity for a different backup software many Mac fans . Time Machine has its pros and cons. Under the hood of a glossy interface with “bells and whistles” it’s nothing more than a simple file-backup utility, which can’t even work with locked files on demand. There is no simple way of restoring your system after a disaster. You will have to restore the Mac OS then use Time Machine to restore all of your files. Obviously this isn’t an ideal situation and a rather long procedure.
I want to tell you about Paragon Volume Snapshot for Mac, an application, which implements a new level of data security in the Mac World. As it can be seen from its name Snapshot for Mac is a snapshot technology application (as opposed to Time Machine). In fact Paragon Volume Snapshot is the first snapshot backup solution for Mac.
Basically a snapshot is a image of your entire hard drive including your OS and data. Snapshot for Mac is an online-backup technology, thus it’s able to work with locked files and folders at the time of archive creation. It’s closely related with the Disk Image utility, so in the end you will get images as well-known DMG files. And finally, you can boot your Mac with the Mac OS X installation disc; perform quick restore of your whole application environment from a DMG image in several minutes without any fuss; boot your Mac as usually and continue your work as if nothing had happened.
Let’s see how to use the Paragon Volume Snapshot utility. Just click on the installation package, choose where to install Snapshot for Mac and restart your Mac. The restart is needed for kernel extension installation.
Click the Paragon Volume Snapshot icon in the Applications window, the program’s main window will open.
Here you can see all available volumes on hard drives in the system. Choose one you want to backup and click the “Backup” button.
The program will ask you where you want to store the image, we suggest you to use an external media (HDD or a flash drive) for this purpose. You may be prompted to enter the administrator credentials to continue.
Then you are all set. The backup will begin and you will take your first image of your Mac and have it stored for easy recovery. The Disk Image utility takes approximately 50% of one CPU resources for the DMG packing; the process is rather quick: 1GB of data per minute.
In the end you will get a DMG file with your system and data. You can mount this image as usual and recover some files and folders, or restore your whole environment later.
Paragon Volume Snapshot for Mac is a simple but robust solution, which you can use for disaster-recovery backup of your Mac computers. It provides a new level of data security that cannot be achieved with the use of Time Machine.
If you are interested in doing an online review of our Snapshot for Mac product, leave a comment.
Let us know what you think about Paragon Snapshot for Mac or your favorite Mac backup solution and you could win a copy for yourself.
The only snapshot based backup solution for comprehensive protection of both data & systems!
Easily create an exact point-in-time copy of your data & system, and when a disaster strikes – get everything back in minutes. Unlike Time Machine and other file-level backup utilities, our solution has very fast backup and restore capabilities. Now you can backup running applications and locked system files, and if your system fails – there is no need re-install, just boot from the Mac® OS X Install DVD and launch the restore operation. This is a huge time saver compared to other methods.
True live protection
Traditional backups involving file archiving has a number of drawbacks, like:
Running applications usually require exclusive rights for processed files, thus preventing a backup program from copying them.
During a volume backup to ensure accessibility of files and the data integrity, a program requires suspension and/or termination of all running applications. For high-capacity disk systems, this could take hours.
Snapshot-based backup easily solves these problems. It’s a common industry term denoting the ability to record the state of a storage device at any given moment (make a snapshot), and then preserve that snapshot as a guide for restoring the machine in case of emergency.
Fastest Recovery
The old way: In case of a system malfunction (it fails to boot), you should re-install the system first. To do that, you need to boot from a distributive CD and install the system (~40 minutes). After that, you need to set up Time Machine and roll back to the required state of the system. This process is time-consuming as it involves re-installation of the operating system.
The better way: With Paragon Snapshot for Mac you don’t need to re-install the system, just boot from a Mac OS X Installation DVD and restore via Disk Utility. Moreover, data retrieval from snapshot is accomplished through private interfaces, which is faster, than processing files on a file system level. Reduce the number of steps it takes to restore your system with Snapshot for Mac®.
