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This produces a warning:

$ wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:I: -include:C: -quiet

    This will back up DRIVENAME (C:) to I:.

    Note:
      The list of volumes included for backup does not include all the volumes that 
      contain operating system components. This backup cannot be used to perform a 
      system recovery. However, you can recover other items if the destination media
      type supports it.

What is if for, then? What does this mean "...you can recover other items if the destination media type supports it"? That it's mountable? If so, how?

I do know the below is for a bare metal restore, so why does the first way exist, and how to actually use it?

wbadmin start backup -allcritical -backupTarget:D: -include:C: -quiet
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  • While not addressing your question, a general FYI - there are a variety of cons to using wbadmin for maintaining backups since it has little, if any, compression, relies upon external XML config files to make the VHD backups work, and has no parity to verify if corruption exists within backups. A more storage efficient, native solution is to capture WIMs, appending new backups to the base WIM, which has no external config files. Capturing boot and WinRE partitions aren't needed since they can both be recreated from WinPE, but can be captured in WIMs.
    – JW0914
    Commented Mar 1 at 12:09

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wbadmin is available on all current versions of Windows, but while on Windows 10 / 11 it can be only used for full-volume backup, on Windows Server Editions it can also be used to backup single folders or files. Thus, some of the available options just are of no use in Windows 10.

That said, someone could assume that it's enough to backup the system drive C: in order to do a bare metal restore. But that's not enough: you'll need also the bootloader and the Windows recovery volume. So, if you do your wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:I: -include:C: -quiet , Windows will give you a warning: because you're backing up your system drive, but you won't be able to actually recover your system from such backup !

However, you could have a data drive D:, so it would make sense to do wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:I: -include:D: -quiet. This will give you the possibility for a full recovery of drive D:. So that's the main use case on a Windows 10 system of wbadmin without -allcritical.

Sources / Further reading:

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