My personal opinion is that Microsoft has "lost it completely" with respect to file management. Unfortunately there are few options that an individual user can find to make things work reliably, and Microsoft doesn't really care, since there are still lots of people who will "buy whatever" as long as it has lots of buttons, flashes and beeps, and costs enough to bully those with older stuff that actually worked.

I believe I've followed Microsoft instructions for making a "system backup" for everything since MS-DOS 3.1, using almost every available kind of storage media from floppy disks, tape, Bernoulli disks, CD, DVD, and hard drive partitions. The "backups" invariably are compressed and encrypted, so that it's almost impossible to restore a few files. It's "all or nothing" to put something back, so people don't try very often. (A "restore" destroys almost everything you've done since the backup was made.) In every case where I've tried to restore from a "Microsoft backup" (or "image") the result has been total failure. Backup is exclusively to WOM! (Write Only Memory).

You can COPY your personal files to another place, and while most people refer to this as a "backup" it would be better to call it an "Archive," if only because an "Archive" like this sometimes works, while "Backups" seldom do.

Some "annoying new features" began to appear with WinXP, became "bothersome" in Vista, and are nearly impenetrable in Win7. Since Win8 apparently is not intended to allow users to do much of anything except "tweet" and "be social," I haven't looked much at it.

THE INACCURACIES IN TIME REMAINING ESTIMATES are because it's very difficult to make an accurate estimate, and Microsoft doesn't do hard stuff any more. (And an accurate estimate would take longer than just copying the stuff?)

It appears that the system looks at the size of the first folder, and at how many folders there are (at that level), and calculates a time from only that information, assuming that all the folders are "about the same size." When it goes to a new folder with different contents, the folder size probably is different and the number of folders left is reduced by one, and a new wrong estimate is calculated.

Doing much more than that becomes exceedingly difficult, since a folder with one 10GB file in it will copy at least twice as fast as a folder with 10 1GB files, and an even slightly more accurate guess would require looking at how many folders are in the folder and how many folders are in each folder in the folder and ....

Since you KNOW that the estimate is inaccurate, you can ignore it. The system will let you know when it's done, and that's really all that matters much. You can go get a cup of coffee, but even if the estimated time is 10 hours, if you leave the process will stop within 30 seconds with a "do you want to replace this existing file" or "the file name is too long to copy, what do you want to do about it" or ... or ... - so you have to "Keepen Die Handen Offen Die Komputeren und Watch Das Blinken Lichts" (or whatever that old cartoon said). (But the blinking lights actually meant something and the estimates don't really tell you much of anything.)

Any estimate that's persistent for more than a minute is probably a lot longer time than the process actually will take - based on my experience, if that's any help to you. But of course that just a "usually" and is no guarantee.

The biger problem is when Explorer (the file management one) LIES about what folder you're pointing at, and what's in it. LEARN TO USE F5 every time, before you believe anything it says if your storage is even moderately large.

John