Any good imaging software will allow for full and incremental image backups. Also the incremental imaging can run in Windows in the background. Paragon calls that "hot processing" I believe. Incremental image backups only contain system changes since the last full backup. A typical senerio is do a full image backup weekly and incremental ones daily.
Bottom line, you can do imaging incrementally and not even know it's running. The drawback is the image restore is a bit more complicated since you have to restore the last full image backup and then each of the incremental ones. Most good imaging software will automate most of this.
I am just old fashioned and don't trust imaging out of Windows.
As far as if it is an appropriate solution for a single program installation is relative. A malware infection is a single program install in reality.
In a single PC test environment, a virtual machine is the preferred platform I would say.
Actually, more and more people are creating a VM just to run their browser from. Get infected, no problem. Re-create the VM or reload from a backup. There are resource considerations with a VM. WMWare is light on resources, Microsoft's VM is a pig.