Backups of iw-store - Best Practices?

System

Hi -

Our TeamSite backing store is pretty large - 44GB. Because of the fact that the server must be frozen during backups of iw-store, we have set aside the hours of 11pm-5am to freeze the server and do backups. However, the last time we tried to do a full backup, it ended up taking 10+ hours to compress the file using WinRar. Since the backup can't be done piecemeal (that I know of), we had to schedule a 10 hour outage to get the backup. We don't want to continue to have to schedule an outage and we would like to do backups nightly. Does anyone have suggestions about ways we might be able to complete the backup faster/more efficiently?

Just to reiterate, we are currently just using WinRar to compress the iw-store directory. We are on a Windows 2000 server with TeamSite 5.5.2 SP3 and OD 5.6.

Thanks for any and all suggestions.