I bought a 3TB WD "My Book" external hard drive that's made for USB 3 so I also bought a Rocketfish USB 3 card with two ports (which works great with my new Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone which also uses USB 3).
 
However, my Acronis boot CD doesn't seem able to read the My Book (and therefore can't backup directly to it unless Windows 7 is running - then it sees the drive correctly - weird).  So...  I backed up a drive with about 500 GB used to another online drive and am now copying the backup file to the external hard drive - but the copy screen is estimating 13(!) hours to do this (averaging about 34+MB per second).  Since I've got two other drives that are larger (including one that's about 1.8 TB) none of this is looking realistic for weekly backups done during the night!
 
I'm going to try to backup another non-OS disk directly to the external (since Acronis seems to see the My Book when I'm in Windows 7), but I'll have to do the same two-step process for the OS disk...
 
This all seems ridiculously slow to me.  I thought things should now blaze with USB 3.0 - not sure why it seems like it's dragging.
 
How are the rest of you doing your backups?

I did a backup a couple of days ago.
 
It took about 3 hours to completely copy my projects drive & burn a system image using Acronis.
 
I'd say that was about 500Gb in total. Roughly. Maybe a bit more.
 
This was using WD My book externals under USB 2

I'm now using Macrium Reflect and it backs up faster than Acronis did.  I don't have any hard figures but what would take Acronis about 20 minutes or so to do a hard drive back up from an SSD with about 80GB of data to an external USB 2.0 hard drive, takes about 15 minutes with Macrium.
 
I have an external USB 3.0 drive and USB 3.0 port on my new PC, but I don't see any substatial faster disk I/O than I do with a USB 2.0 drive and USB 2.0 port.
 
 

Yeah...  By my calculations I was getting about "average" USB 2 speeds and the time recalculated to about 4.5 hours right before I turned off the screen and went to bed for a few hours.
 
But still, this speed is pretty much unusable!
 
I've got about 170 GB on my OS drive, 544 GB on one partition (documents and client files) then my music on a third hard drive (510 GB) and a second partition (1.7 TB).  So, almost 3 TB of data used (out of 5.5 TB total over the three physical drives).  At 34 MB/S it would take over 24 hours just to straight copy the backup files!  No idea how long if I had to copy individual files, create the backup files directly to the My Book or create individual backup files prior to copying.
 
USB 2 caps at 60 MB/S (480 Mbps), but USB 3 should be ten times faster (and USB 3.1 should be twenty times faster).  If that 24 hours went down to 2.4, then this all becomes viable.  I guess I'll have to call and try to figure out why I'm not seeing those speeds.

I use carbonite to start with (has already saved my butt once and my wifes once)
then I manually copy paste to a NAS drive that's me personally
here at ADK we have a server that backs up nightly to a 2nd set of raid 6 drives
then it backs up to a NAS Raid 6 weekly (using Paragon) then I have an ext drive that's supposed to be a copy of the NAS and taken off site
I forget to swap the one from home with the one here far to frequently.
 
bare in mind the back ups are only as good as the data being backed up. we had a corrupted database and multiple copies of it..
back ups were working.. we had to rebuild it.. not pretty

Hmm...  Interesting thought Scott!  I just happen to be physically connected to my "wireless" network router.  I wonder what speeds I could get by using the external as a NAS.  May have to try that today.
 
I used to use Carbonite but it took me WEEKS to get everything uploaded to their servers and, after at least two years, I finally gave up on it.  While it was great at immediately backing up a file right after you edited it, I had some issues with it.  Back then I was doing some programming for a client that was using versioning so I had Turtle SVN and, I believe, an Autodesk product along with Carbonite and they all wanted to put overlays on file icons - that was a minor problem.  The main issue I had was the files they kept HAD to match what was on my hard drives.  I couldn't use them for archival storage to free up space and, should I accidentally delete a file and not notice it in time, it was removed from their servers as well making it unavailable for restore once I realized the file was missing.
 
If only I could get the USB speeds to get closer to what's possible, then I don't have a problem getting additional harddrives and a USB 3 toaster.

 I've gone back to hard copies for the main C: partition, I've made 2 complete backups since I upgraded, both on single layer Blu-Ray recordable disks One bootable with the new Acronis demo that took about four hours. One with the free version of paragon that only took just under one hour. Both backups took three disks.
 Acronis use to be my favorite backup program in the early P4 days when there wasn't a lot of choices. I'm pretty disappointed in the demo, they have become what we use to hate about Symantec ghost. Way to many resource hungry process to keep it installed. It actually had a noticeable loss in performance which was verified by a few benchmarks and a .1 reduction in the Win experience index fro HD transfer rate.
 
 So far I'm really impressed with the free version of paragon. I'm also very impressed with backing up to Blu-Ray and consider it the current best way to back up massive amounts of data quickly.
 
For projects, media files and programs, being an old computer tech, I have a lot of old IDE drives laying around. I picked up one of these from ebay http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-2-0-to-IDE-SATA-S-ATA-2-5-3-5-HD-HDD-Adapter-Cable-/180550148600?pt=US_Drive_Cables_dapters&hash=item2a09a0a1f8
and use those.

I've submitted an inquiry to Rocketfish, but I did find someone else posting about the same exact problem and the suggestion there was to reinstall the card and make sure the power was really making it to the card.  Since I happened upon a really nice power splitter today with the required, rarely used anymore, connector, I might try this.  The power connector that's on there now (the ONLY one I could find in dozens of saved cables) seemed a bit flakey so maybe that's the issue - I'll know sometime tomorrow when I can reopen the box.

I use an external USB2 drive. Backups take about 5 seconds or less for ongoing projects, because I use a batch file and xcopy /d to only copy changed files, and back up each project after I work on them.

That might be an option for my music files.  I have a utility called Allway Sync that I use to see what's different between two directories (and to sync them up as needed).