I'm shocked that Dell undermines Windows backup in Windows 7 Professional.  Your comments here convince me not to pay for the premium edition.  Various people on other internet searches have said Dell had a terrific backup program 6 months ago, but then weakened it to be able to sell a Premium version, while also hobbling the Windows backup program.  You might try a free backup software like Comodo since I suspect you can't use the Windows Backup which makes an image backup along with file backups.  It was a great simple approach that Dell seems to have blocked in their new versions of Windows 7 Professional.  I may take back my computer because of this kind of game playing.  Since I bought it at Costco, I have 90 days to return it.  I've also begun to look at a range of online backups.  Carbonite seemed to clog up my computer terribly, and while highly recommended, it was slow, slow, slow.  I'm trying CrashPlan which seems to work much much much more quickly.  Those two are paid services.  CrashPlan has lots of versatility for allowing the beginner to grow into something much more powerful.  They have free versions for saving to hard disks and other computers.  The online version has Unlimited storage, lots of versatility, without the limits other plans have, and it's only 4 to 6 dollars per month, depending on current sales and payment arrangements. 
Since updating my Dell Backup and Recovery software to version 1.7.5.63, I am now having problems getting past the "Dell Backup  and Recovery Please Wait" screen. I did leave this to run for over 8 hours but found that this process still does not complete. The only way I could find to stop this process from running is to click on the ? at the top right of the screen and then select "Activity Logs". At that point, I clicked on the home button to bring me back to the Dell Backup and Recovery Premium Edition home page and close the application. However, when I tried to re-open the application again, it brings me back to the "Dell Backup  and Recovery Please Wait" screen. To fix this issue, I tried to restore from a previous backup that I made from the Dell Backup and Recovery application but this failed miserably and corrupted my hard drive and operating system (Windows 8.1). So the only way I could recover from that was to go revert back to my bootable backup disks that I created when I first got my Dell Latitude E6530 laptop. I then had to re-installed all 100 + Windows updates to upgrade back to Windows 8.1 Pro through the Windows store. From that point I upgraded my "Dell Backup and Recovery (Premium Edition)" software back to 1.7.5.63 and got the same problem again. Does anyway have a fix for this or tell me how I can raise a incident with Dell, as this is so ignoring and frustrating. I could uninstall my Dell Backup and Recovery (Premium Edition) software and reinstall the version found in [URL] but the last time I did this, it installed the basic edition and not the Premium Edition. Straight enough the last time I had problems with my Dell Backup and Recovery (Premium Edition) software, it seem to fix itself from another update after a couple of months but I don't really won't to revert to a previous backup with a older version of the Dell Backup and Recovery (Premium Edition) software. Any help or advice, would be extremely grateful. 
Dell Backup and Recovery (Premium Edition) 1.7.5.63