No kidding, it takes AMAZINGLY long to backup and restore... restore takes several hours...
I know this doesn't help you much, but one thing I have found is that the Microsoft MyPhone service restored about 3,000 texts to my phone, remotely, in about 5 minutes.
WTF!? That would have taken about 3 hours with PIMBackup.
I wonder what Microsoft does differently? Although, my texts STILL did not re-thread themselves properly, but I think that is ROM/base-dependent...
Still impressed though.
I am trying to go through and load up all my PIMBackup files, and sync to MyPhone, but this is a very tedious task. Literally hours upon hours of waiting with no phone usage...