It's not that bad. You can manually do it with your cpanel provided by the ISP, even for shared accounts usually.
You could do it from the shell with a command
You could set a cron to automatically do it. I have it set to backup up the sql db every day at 2:50am and 2:50pm. It names them by the day of the week, keeping a 7 day rotation of backups. The folders/files get backed up to an archive once daily. The instructions for these can be found on this forum.
My home PC has a script that reaches out via secure ftp and grabs a copy of the files daily, so they aren't JUST on the ISP. ISP's fail, it has happened to me TWICE over the years, so it's good to have it off-site, IMO.
The isp also does an extra automated backup, via JETBACKUP, but I don't really use/trust/look at those. It's there as a fall back plan if the above 2 fail, though, or if I want to go back more than 7 days.
