"not able to create a backup of the Windows partition though without a reboot"
Interesting, because that does not gel with my own experiences with the Paragon products, although I switched from Backup & Recovery Free to Hard Disk Manager 14 just over a year ago and it might be that the latest free version has such problems whilst the paid for edition does not.
FWIW there is one other fact about Paragon's tools that might be worth pointing out, in light of recent experiences of my own, in that they don't cope well with disk faults - the backup will simply stop and refuse to create a usable image. Whether that is a good approach or a bad one is arguable, but I had a backup fail a couple of days ago and the error message lead me to check the SMART data only to find that the Pending Sector Count was non-zero. Subsequent investigations and troubleshooting suggest that this failure was caused by a single bad sector (in a Stardock icon file, funnily enough) but as soon as it became apparent that the disk was having problems I wanted to be able to take an image of it, bad sectors and all - preferably with an error log telling me which files were affected. Paragon won't do that, best as I can tell, and research suggests that this applies to a fair few of the commercial backup tools.
In the end I took a punt, because Windows would still boot (the OS is on an SSD not the failing HD, although all of the user profiles are on the spinning disk) and used FreeFileSync to take a backup copy of everything on the partition, topped up by a command line copy using Take Command (the sync ran as administrator and that account does not have access to one or two encrypted folders) and I've got a boot time CHKDSK running as I type this, so fingers crossed. I've also got a new 1TB HD all ready to roll but if the CHKDSK doesn't clear the fault then Paragon isn't going to allow me to clone the drive and I'm going to have to find another way.
(BTW apologies that this looks like thread archaeology but this post appeared on the list of recent articles because someone else replied to it today but they seem to have subsequently deleted their post, perhaps realising that the original was five months old. However, I am going to leave my reply here in case it is useful to anyone)
