Doing the 1st backup of our iMac - estimating 37 days!

Hi and help.
We seem to have a very sick iMac. Having popped into our local Apple store and explaining that it has been slowing down and going into deep sleeps for a few weeks now... It then decided to take a turn for the worse and go into snail mode. At home we tried to do a few things to help. we emptied the trash. We emptied our downloads and trashed them. We cleaned up our desktop, deleted some duplicate software. Nothing helped. Hubby went into the utilities and began running the repair permissions command - it estimated 14 days 10 hours! In the Apple store we looked at running the same function on a similar device it said 8 mins. Needless to say we stopped the repair permissions function. The store assistant suggested we should do a back up before then looking at reloading lion. So we bought a western digital hard drive, linked it to the computer and started it running with Time Machine. It is obviously struggling to cope with the task ahead of it. We have closed everything else down... It began estimating 29 days, jumped to 44 and is now at 37, it has been running for 10 hours and has managed 2.19 GB of 220.64GB. It is counting down slowly and the estimate is at 34 days. Should we leave it running regardless? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

You've probably got either hardware problems, or directory damage on your internal HD.
Time Machine (and most any other backup app) must use the directory on your Mac, so it's going to be awfully slow, if it ever completes at all.
For this purpose, your best bet may be to cancel the backup, and use the Restore tab of Disk Utility to copy the internal HD to the external.  That will do what's called a "block copy" of everything on the internal, damage and all, but it doesn't need to use the directory, so should be fairly quick (unless the problem is the disk hardware).  See #1 in Using Disk Utility for formatting instructions (the drive may not be set up properly for this), then #7 there to do the copy.
Then start up from your Recovery HD and run Repair Disk (not permissions) on the internal. 
If that fixes things, restart normally and run Repair Disk Permissions (it's best to do that while running from OSX, not the Recovery HD).

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