Nope, Witcher 1 saves are just really large (for some reason in addition to all the flags they also contain some locale data and such). 10GiB is actually pretty reasonable for a Witcher playthrough.
It's similar in the Witcher 2, 3 and Skyrim. The saves start small and they grow to 10MB as you progress in the game. I guess there is a lot of world state and items to hold in an RPG. Count a few hundred saves, manual or autosave and that's a lot of space.
In the witcher 1 there is also an uncompressed BMP thumbnail with each save that is about a megabyte. It's PNG compressed in the witcher 2. They learned from their mistake.
My witcher saves were 10GB, until I realize that problem and deleted them, no wounder backups were slow. Skyrim is not that far off.
Pretty sure backup is already integrated in steam for these two games.