Did you change the target rounds? I don't know how they are using the variables for the progress bar, whether or not they are cached or fetched from the UI settings.
EDIT: Mine shows 9577.00000083 tDRK anonymized out of a target of 11000 tDRK with 6 rounds. The progress bar shows 99% since...
I host mine (176.31.109.97) on OVH SAS (Kimsufi in France) for roughly 5 euros a month. I live in the US but OVH is good since it is fast where I live still. I run a masternode on testnet. I check on it every few days. I just noticed that darkcoin was not responding today. Luckily it did not...
When I upgraded from 0.10.12.31 to 0.10.12.32 I experienced high CPU load when it was processing blocks and low CPU load when generating keys. Very strange. Probably the combination of processing blocks and generating new keys at the same time.
There were updates at http://www.darkcoin.io/downloads/rc4/darkcoind, http://www.darkcoin.io/downloads/rc4/darkcoin-qt, http://www.darkcoin.io/downloads/master-rc4/darkcoind, http://www.darkcoin.io/downloads/master-rc4/darkcoin-qt
BTW, these are old version, 0.9.12.25 and 0.10.12.25, but they...
I don't do it currently with USBs. I just have 4 harddrives of similar usage (about 5000 hours PowerOnTime) which is very normal for server class hard drives.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that they are also encrypted and then sent to my web-based servers around the world.
Not totally, I just copy them in their current state, so I have versioned copies based on date since I backup regularly. This is also on a machine with darksend disabled so there are not too many keys used.