Interesting discussions. I stopped using Backup Assist for my AC backups when the ACBU was available w/ V4. Since I didn't have the SQL plug-in for BackupAssist, I knew it would not backup properly. Therefore I'm using ACBU and it is working fine for me.
My imported Items folder is over 40 GB, and I've elected to back it up separately once per week to a external hard drive (even that takes quite a while, many minutes). Trying to send 40GB over the internet takes time, no question about that, so I do not use the OffSite Backup for Imported Items however I do use it for the other components of AC.
.PDF's are highly compressed as they stand, therefore trying to compress them further does not yield a lot more space but takes moretime. It's really not time efficient to try compressing PDF files. Therefore I don't bother.
