How long does it take to bakup 1 terabyte

It should not take that long. Here are a couple of thoughts:

1) USB2 is slow (and I assume you have USB2 and not 1?!?). Try transfering some large files to the external drive and see what your average speed is. 20MB/second or so is common. E-Sata will be a much faster solution, if you must use an external drive. Also, USB shares bandwidth across the bus, so stop using other data intensive USB devices.

2) Are you doing a sector by sector backup? If so, you have to push around 1TB of data instead of 170GB (max, assuming no compression). This would obviously take much longer.

3) How is your CPU usage looking? If the backup is set to run low priority, and other "normal" tasks are eating up CPU cycles, the backup will take longer. If Acronis is eating a lot of CPU, then the processor may be the bottleneck. Encryption and Compression will increase CPU load, though compression will also reduce the data transfered via USB.

4) Are you doing this from Windows or from the boot disk? The latter may have incompatibilities with your hardware that is forcing USB1 speeds.

Thank you NemesisDB: 1) I am using a USB 2 port although I am going to re-try using another USB port. 2) I am attempting a complete backup to an external drive (verification was started about 8 hours ago and is continuing), 3) I am going to try to backup to another external hard drive thinking that the one I am using is too slow. 4) I am using the windows verson and not the CD boot. 5) I am doing nothing else with the computer and have assigned a normal priority to the backup, 6) The CPU shows about 3-5% usage.

I think that there is something else wrong but I can not figure out what it is?