Windows Vista can automatically schedule file backups that back up your most important documents. It does not, however, give you a wizard to schedule Complete PC backups.
Complete PC backups store your entire hard disk (well, your system volume), so if your hard drive dies at some point, you can do a quick restore and be up and running again in minutes. That’s better than file backups in many ways, because all your applications will be restored, and none of your files or settings will be lost.
It’s so useful, you should schedule automatic Complete PC backups to an external hard disk. Just follow these steps:
1. Click Start, type Task Scheduler, and then press Enter (you’ll need admin rights).
2. In Task Scheduler, in the Actions pane, click Create Basic Task.
3. The Create A Basic Task wizard appears. In the Name box, type Complete PC Backup. Click Next.
4. On the Task Trigger page, click Next to accept a daily schedule.
5. On the Daily page, configure the time that you want the backup to run. It should run at a time when your computer is turned on and connected to your backup media (like your external hard disk). Don’t worry if your computer won’t always be connected–the backup will fail, but as long as it runs most nights, you’ll be fine. Click Next.
6. On the Action page, click Next to accept Start a program as the default.
7. On the Start A Program page, in the Program/script box, type Wbadmin. in the Add arguments box, type start backup -backupTarget:BackupDriveLetter: -include:C: -quiet. Replace BackupDriveLetter with the drive letter of your backup drive. For example, my backup drive is my L drive, so I used the arguments shown in this screenshot. Click Next.
8. Select the Open the Properties dialog for this task when I click Finish checkbox. Then, click Finish.
9. The Properties dialog appears. On the General tab, select the Run with highest privileges checkbox. Then, click OK.
To test your backup, click the Task Scheduler Library node in the left pane of Task Scheduler. Then, right-click your Complete PC Backup task and click Run. You should see the command prompt appear as the Complete PC backup runs. If it doesn’t run, make sure the account you specified on the General tab has administrative privileges.
If this is the first time you’ve run a Complete PC backup, it’ll take a while–more than an hour. After that, it’ll only take 10-20 minutes (maybe less).
Thank very much for this tutorial.
Tony, I have Vista Premium, preinstalled on a Gateway PC. I checked the c:\windows\system32 folder and the file wbadmin is not there (I set Folders to show hidden and system files too). On my second question, I want to install to a specific directory rather than have the backup wipe out what is on that external drive now. Can that be done, assuming there is a way to run this. Thanks!
Dear Tony,
I guess I am a computer novice, but I have tried several different things with scheduling a complete system backup without being able to make it run. I upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate this morning and I was abloe to follow your directions to the “T”. The only persons using this computer is my wife and I, so we have administrative privilege, we had to click on continue when we opened the task scheduler in the 1st place. Can you help?
I believe complete PC backup only works on Vista business and Ultimate, but this is a great article and should really be the sort of thing that is trivial to set up in vista, and not require users go hunting online…
Haven’t tested it yet. Will do that after my manual backup is finished :)
Thanks for the easy step-by-step tutorial
Thanks for this, it is just what I was looking for and works a treat using Vista Ultimate X64. Many thanks
Can I include more disks to backup? How?
Thanks :)
This backup kept failing on me until I tried it from a command prompt and saw the error message. A complete PC backup will only work on a drive formatted as NTFS. A quick format of the drive solved the problem.
Also note that an incremental backup will work with either NTFS or FAT32.
And thank you for the great article.