Vista: Automate and Schedule Complete PC Backup
Windows Vista includes Complete PC Backup, an image-based backup program that works similarly to Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage. Complete PC Backup creates an image of one or more entire hard disk partitions. In the event of a hard drive failure, you can replace the disk, restore from that image, and have your computer right back at the state it was in when you last backed it up.
Unfortunately, Complete PC Backup does not have a scheduling function built in so that you can automate backups. Fortunately, the command-line equivalent wbadmin.exe supports a rich command structure and with a little help from Task Scheduler, you can schedule automatic image backups.
wbadmin.exe supports the following commands:
Start Backup. Runs a backup.
Stop Job. Stops a running backup.
Get Items. Lists backed up items.
Get Status. Lists status of currently running backup.
The Start Backup command is the one we’re concerned with here. To create a full command, you can use the following parameters:
-backuptarget. Indicates the location to save the backup image. This can be a drive letter or a UNC path.
-include. List of drive letters, volume mount points, or volume names to include in the backup.
-noverify. Tells wbadmin not to verify backups written to removable media such as DVD.
-quiet. Runs the command with no user prompts.
So, let’s look at a simple backup command:
wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:e:\backups -include:C: -quiet
This command starts a backup of the C drive and saves the image to the Backups folder on the E drive, and does it with no user prompts. This would be a useful command for backing up the typical computer with one hard drive to a folder on an external hard drive.
To make this work as a scheduled backup, all you need to do is open Task Scheduler and create a new task using this command on the appropriate schedule.
Is this slash correct?:
“-backuptarget:e:/backups”
^
or should it be a backstroke?
You are correct. It should be a backstroke. I changed it in the article and thanks for catching the mistake!
You might note that Vista Home versions do not hav wbadmin installed….
Hi,
I did a complete pc backup of a vista system and tried to duplicate the image to another system of exactly the same model using WinRE. It seemed to be successful but, after restarting the system, it could not boot saying “disk error”. What went wrong?
To fix the disk error restart your computer and boot the Vista Installation Disk. Once there you click continue and click repair my computer. You can try to do the automatic repair but the command prompt works a lot better. Start the command prompt and type in bootrec. This will display four different repairs that you can make. Try bootrec \RebuildBCD
How do you automatically remove old backups.
For example, say I only want to keep at most 2 backup copies of my C drive, taken weekly. Would be nice if you could specify this as a parameter.
Unfortunately, this is not an available parameter. But I agree it would be very useful.
After the first successful backup, I am getting failures every day with error: 0×81000006 saying the destination cannot be found. Has anyone found a fix for this?
Here is the full error:
File backup failed. The error is: The backup location cannot be found or is not valid. Review your backup settings and check your hardware configuration. (0×81000006).
Thanks for your help!