Hi Jerry, have they tried making more "volumes" to hold the data and then
jack up the resourceutilization to allow multiple processes to tackle the
task.
I had something like that on a unix box... half million files in a file
system that was only a few GB's... took hours to back up.  I seem to recall
that creating virtual mount points for top level subdirectories helped (with
increased processes) but that box has since been retired and don't have it
currently (and I too have lost a few brain cells in the mean time)

DWight