Can Windows 7 backup be run while working with multiple applications

I'm getting an alert from Windows 7 that it is detecting problems on my hard drive. I am therefore trying to frequently backup while I try to figure out if it is a false alarm or not.

However, the backup is taking 4-5 hours, even after I do a complete backup and then I have to just do what I was assuming only the delta between the previous backup in the current backup.

Since it is taking that much time, I have no my choice except to work on the different applications that I am using.

Since it seems that the Windows backup is backing up the systems file as well as the application configuration, will it become a problem if I'm working on the applications on the machine while also trying to back them up?

An additional question is why is it taking that much time for every backup even though Windows 7 is backing up to the same file on the same external hard drive. It seems it is trying to do a backup from scratch every time I invoke it

Thanks for any inputs

You can run the backup but it may slow the pc to crawl. If the disk has bad sectors it will try thousands of times to read it. Have you run chkdsk on the drive if it's just file system errors it can correct it if it's hardware bad sectors it can't be fixed and any data may be corrupted anyway

Thanks chkdsk returned ok. No bad sectors. So I am guessing that windows 7 is giving false alarms. n), PC is not slowing but the the backup, the PC does not slow down. The backup slows down horribly. So I am guessing I will have to launch it probably at night.

The thing is if chkdsk finds bad sectors and marks them as bad they dont show up in checks so the ting to do is goto disk makers site and get their disk test software see if it says you have a lot of bad sectors