iTunes restore taking long time

Did you, at any point while having the phone, have iCloud backups turned on on the iPhone? Hit cancel again and try and restore from one of those backups if you had that turned on.

If you are using an iCloud backup already then this may be the problem... as iCloud severs may be taking their time to provide you with the backup

I had this problem having had the requirement to restore my iPhone after help from Applecare. I screen shared with the Apple guy as I was getting 100 hrs restore time reported and I showed him my BB speed was 75/20, he was amazed and checked the Apple servers and got a report that all was well.

On a hunch I went next door and used my neighbours (slower) BB and had the restore completed in less than 20 minutes.

I have reported it to my ISP and I am still in discussion with them. I remembered I had a similar problem with Office365 continually failing to upgrade. My ISP fixed that problem.

With my iPhone I was due to be in the US in less than 100 hrs, panic was an understatement.

terry8732 wrote:

Should I wait it out? Should I stop it and abort the mission?

These are subjective judgement calls. Personally, I would let the restore continue overnight, but it's your call.

terry8732 wrote:

How else can I get my stuff back??

Restore it to a new iOS device.

As long as the back up is still on your computer then you should have no problem with starting over. Just hit cancel and try and restore the phone again. It sounds like its getting hung up somewhere so if it doesen't work a second time you may have corrupted files in the backup or something like that.