Is there a way have a task to timeout ?

We have Acronis True Image Server® version 9.1 installed on windows 2003 servers which are on vessels. We use some external usb disk in order to get the backups, using scheduled jobs. Some times the usb connection might be lost,or the disk gets full, during the time that the backup is taken. Then the job
continues without failling and the task keeps on running for ever. Is there someway to have the job to timeout after some predifined time period? Beside that is there some commands from the windows command line we could use so that to cancel a running task without killing the process, as it is very expensive to login via remote desktop on the ship's server.