It has been awhile, but backup took about 1.5hr on 1.3TB Database. Copy another few hours and restore a bit longer. Secondary server was not required right away, so once backup was completed ( we skipped verify part) on Primary, it was available to use.

At that time I was having tables with few hundred mln rows, a lot of writes, so missing one wknd for reindexing was unacceptable.

By the way I was using LS for backup and restore. Without it, the above scenario would be unacceptable

The alternative to the that scenation would be using BCV\Time Finders Snaps, but it is very expensive from hardware point of view and require a lot of tweaking.