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Windows Server 2012 Backup System State

How to use task scheduler to back up Windows 2012 server system state

Open Task scheduler on Windows 2012, by opening “Control Panel” and clicking on “Administrative Tools” and selecting “Task Scheduler”.

Or you can just go to the start menu and type “task” to search “Task Scheduler” and click "Task Scheduler" on search result to open.



On “Task Scheduler” window, click on “Create Basic Task” which can be found on the upper right corner of the task scheduler  window.

Upon clicking on “Create Basic Task”, the wizard will open and type the name of the Task.

Since the task is to backup “System State” it would be good to name it “Backup System State”  if you’re backing up multiple servers then you can include the name of the server also.

If you have multiple backups and you don’t have any idea for which server is the system state backup then basically it’s good as nothing.

So naming convention is quite important to avoid confusion.

If you want to be quite specific, you can write something  on the description box.


After typing the task name click on next, the system will ask the backup frequency.

Depends on how critical is your system, you can set it at daily, weekly or monthly.

On my case, weekly basis is good enough.

On selecting the backup frequency, you need to consider also the performance and the resources of the server don’t backup at peak hours or when the server is highly utilized.

Click on next, and set the date and hour when you want to start the backup.


Click on next and select “Start a Program”.



Click on next, here’s the most important part. You will need to set the command and the parameters to back up the system state.



On “Program/Script” text box, type “wbadmin”.

On “Add arguments (optional)”, type this parameters:

 start systemstatebackup  -backupTarget:\\192.168.1.7\backup\XServerSysState  -quiet

basically it’s:

wbadmin start systemstatebackup 
        -backupTarget:network: location in UNC path -quiet

It would be wise to place the backup on a network share, anyway the purpose of the backup is to use it to recover or restore  once the system goes south.

So if you just store the system state on the same server (in which the system state is being back up) to another partition, then if the system is corrupted or goes down then your backup also goes down.

Once the command and the parameters has been set, click on next and setting up the task scheduler is done.

Click on “finish” to close the wizard.


If you want to try whether the “task scheduler” is working or not, you can force it to run ahead of the schedule by right clicking on the task and selecting “run”.

If everything  goes fine, this window will appear:



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