I am also a new user and am having these extremely slow backup problems. Uploading 230GB and it's been about 10 days or so now. Still another 3 days left.
As someone else said, I'm glad I got the $7 deal. Unfortunately, I'm not real happy with the fact that this is still an issue and I may have to re-evaluate a backup solution for my friends and family. This was supposed to be the CrashPlan alternative. I like everything about IDrive except for the horrible upload speeds. And from reading other postings, it sounds like the download speeds are no better.