Hi DominantDBA and all others who encountered this problem. For piecemeal restores to work as fast as they are suppose to, you have to backup your filegroups seperately. That way you can restore them 'piece-by-piece' in a timely manner. This is how piecemeal restores are meant to be, if you read the MS documentation carefully. Of course, your backup strategy will become more complex by backing up your filegroups seperately and that's why MS should make piecemeal restores from full backup's run faster as they do now. At least, in my opinion.