I recently needed to prune a large table (7 Million records) and
deleted approx 5 Million (they were fairly well distributed
throughout the table). Ti tidy everythiup, I initiated a database
backup (via GBAK) with the intention of doing a subsequent restore.

The original table, before deletions, took an average of 25 minutes
to fully backup. The modified table has, so far, taken some 30 hours
and, extrapolating the current rate forward, looks like it will take
a further 14-16 hours to complete.

Is this normal? It seems like a long time but I imagine that quite a
bit of housekeeping is going on. Anyone got any thoughts? Thanks