In my experience, you are are up a biologically polluted creek without ample
means of muscle-powered transportation.  You are scatalogically abandoned by
Dame Fortune.  You are between a geological formation and a difficult
situation.  Etcetera: large file systems with zillions of small files are a
pain.

There are three solutions:

- raw volume backups.  This works great, unless you need to restore, say,
just one file ;)
You can only restore the whole volume.  If you have some alternate restore
staging area where you can blast all the data back, cherry pick what you
want, and then blow it away, this might be an option.  Or if this is just a
disaster recovery backup, then perhaps raw volume backups are what you want.
But if it's home directories, probably not.

- change your data management/business practices.  If it's Windows, I'm
guessing this is home directories, in which case this isn't really an
option.  If it's some sort of data store, then perhaps you can
zip/tar/archive/etc. older files to reduce the quantity of files.

- FlashBackup.  Unfortunately, FlashBackup isn't available for Windows.
Rumor is 2003.

--
Drew Fabbro
fabbro.andrew AT cnf DOT com 
Desk: 503-450-3374    Cell: 503-701-0469
"There is no such word as 'maturity'.  There
is only 'maturing' and 'dead'." -- Bruce Lee