After working with Level 2 Support for over 6 hours a B/U was eventually completed. The following steps were taken; The phone was restored to factory settings thru iTunes and set up as a NEW phone. An iCloud B/U of the phone was done WITHOUT having first applied an iTunes restore of a B/U of the phone. An iCloud B/U of the raw factory-released phone completed in 15 minutes. That B/U was just 9mb. After that raw factory-released iCloud backup completed, I restored the phone from my iTunes B/U of the phone and started another iCloud B/U of a 2.2gb file. I setup that iCloud B/U to exclude all the phone's app data that's why the file size was 2.2gb. The iCloud B/U finished in 15 hours, a long time for sure but at least it completed. I then enabled most of my apps for data B/U. The next iCloud B/U is estimated an 3.6gb. I purchased 20gb of iCloud storage.