Doing a Manual Backup

[TheGift73]

Hi,

I have been looking into some backup plugins recently, with the latest one being WordPress Backup to Dropbox. The backup process itself seems to be working, but it has been running a backup now for nearly 22hrs. It has currently backed up 17,619 files (1.02GB), but it is doing it incredibly slowly. After looking into what may be causing the slowness, I came across articles stating that it may be down to the WP cron.php which the plugin relies on.
Is this something that I can fix myself?
The other thing is, can I manually back up my files, but accessing them via Filezilla, and making a copy of the

• wp-admin
• wp-content
• wp-includes
• All other files at root level, like .htaccess, index.php etc

It would seem a lot quicker to do it this way? Am I looking at this wrong, or is this a viable way to make a backup. I would be doing this on a twice weekly basis if not more.