Automated System Image Backup
The windows 7 Backup and Restore console do not allow you to schedule System Image backups 
On the other hand, ad hoc manual System Image backups can be performed!
However, in Windows 7 you can use the Wbadmin command-line utility to perform scheduled clones (snapshots) of your PC! The normal backup rules need to be observed before using this utility and these are:
- The destination location should be a second internal hard drive, an external hard drive, a network shared drive or multiple DVDs – not recommended/feasible
- The destination drive should be formatted with NTFS file system – windows 7 default
- Adequate space is available on the destination drive – equal to the source data size (Actually, even less than that!)
- The utility needs administrative privilegese
Now, let’s see how easy it is to create an automated task that initiates a System Image backup of the c: drive and saves it to another drive 
Assuming your windows volume or drive is the c: and your destination drive is e: (where e: can be a second hard drive or a network share). Save the following text in a file with an extension .bat Ex: SystemSnapshot.bat
wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:e: -include:c: -allCritical -quiet
This wbadmin utility will start an image backup of your system, system and boot volumes while it saves it to the e: drive.
As with any script, you can then create a schedule job using SCHTASKS ( Windows Task Scheduler command) as follows:
SCHTASKS /Create /SC weekly /D sun /TN “Imagebkup” /TR c:\scripts\SystemSnapshot.bat /ST 22:00 /IT
where the task scheduler will run the Image backup script every Sunday on weekly basis at 22:00 hours. Assuming the user is logged on and have administrative rights! However, I do recommend to use the native Windows 7 Task Scheduler Utility to set a schedule as this utility is much improved in this new OS Check for errors if any in the history tab of your scheduled task. An error return code of O means ok!
A folder structure is created on the destination drive together with a number of files. The most important file is the .vhd one where in Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate editions, you can restore all your data and applications. How to mount this image and restore your computer will be explained in a future article
Will this delete an existing system image on the backup target. There is only room for one.
If you keep the same target location then it will overwrite the previous backup, so you’re ok but if the last backup fails you end up with no backup at all!!!!
System Image backups make a block-by-block backup of your system volume to a .vhd fi le,
which is stored on local storage such as a second hard disk. You can store a .vhd fi le on
a second hard disk even when that disk holds another operating system. Subsequent backups
to the same media automatically perform an incremental backup. Only the portions of the
hard disk that have changed are copied to the existing System Image backup. Only a single
version of the System Image backup is stored.
Only “File backups” are performed in increments after the first File backup operation is complete. System images are always created in full. Both File backups and System images can be stored in multiple versions, if created on a local disk. The space dedicated to the backups/images can be defined. Old System images are deleted automatically when destination drive is full. If you’re saving your system images in a network location, you can only keep the most current system image for each computer.
Do you know what the -allCritical switch does? Also, what other switches are available when capturing a image of the system?
The option -allCritical will force the job to include the volume where the OS resides. To get more details type:
wbadmin start backup /?
at the comamd prompt
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Very good article. How do you include multiple drives to be include in backup?