The only thing I can think of may be to backup across multiple files, and copy them in parallel.

We created a separate backup network.  Each server has multiple...

Probably read this series of articles first.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/stairway/112556/

There should be nothing else you need to do for developer edition.

When I see something like this stated in a forum post, I kind of shut off.  

I've got thirty years of experience with rdbms tuning, the last...

Read this article, and download the "DelimitedSplit8k" function.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tally+Table/72993/

You code, based upon the little bit of info you posted, would look something like this:

Paul Randall wrote a lot about this, it may help.

https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/corruption-demo-databases-and-scripts/

Quick glance,  The ActivityInstance table contains many more rows. 
The A query is reading 177160 rows on the index seek, the D query is reading 16168215 rows on the same seek

I cannot open either of the files.  Or, better yet, I do not have the patience to work through .xml or a pipe separated file so that I can actually...

Can you post the actual execution plans?