I had the same issue where it took a long time to backup / archive / backup new.

I believe they want to make it idiot proof since they would get the calls / I was patient and the entire process went excellent.

Previously never worked with such and easy year end system.

If you don't mind my asking - how many payroll records did you archive and how many hours did it take?  We have two companies.  The one with 448 records took 8 hours start to finish.  Our other company is much, much larger.  We're concerned about how long it will take. 

I had around 2,000 records and it took 1 hour.  I can certainly see your frustration.  I have been having Microsoft Server Software issues, it's getting hammered with Microsoft processes running using 100% CPU which kills Sage performance.  My IT guy had to load a special software to determine which processes were the culprit and try to kill them since we push our MS upgrades out by another means.  I wonder if you have other things going on with server performance not related to Sage but impacting processing speed?  Good luck

(in reference to Judy's post) It actually takes about 3-4 hours each company and the DB backup file is anywhere from 25-30GB for each company even though the DB is only at most 2GB with the smallest company at 200MB. What version of SQL are you using Ken? Express or full?