How is your external drive connected? USB1, USB2, Firewire, ESATA? It makes a huge difference in backup speed. If you're still connecting through USB1, that's where your bottleneck is.
Just for info.
Backed up my C:\ drive today before the Xmas Hols (who knows what will happen while I'm away). I used Macrium Reflect (Free version). C:\ drive contains the system and all installed softwares. Personal Data(s) split over two other partitions/drives.
To back up my C:\ drive, which has 46gb out of 100gb used, took a grand total of 12 minutes, 32 seconds. The back up file size is 15.5gb in size.
I take what I think is a commonsense approach to managing data. You don't have to be "geeky".
(1) You need more than one partition.
(2) Personal correspondence, spreadsheets, some images you may be editing etc. generally small stuff can live on your OS partition if you like.
(3) Large fairly static data like image data bases, music, video data you don't need to backup as frequently or have a different backup strategy.
I think a manageable size (OS, Programs, small data) of around 40-50GB is reasonable. This is about what I have and it includes quite a number of large 3rd party apps. I do rolling images about once a week and it takes ~20 minutes.
You can also be a bit bolder with the things you try out. If it screws your system up you're back in business in 20 minutes.
I don't think that's geeky.
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