If you are using Linux (or variant), you can use the tar command to quickly backup your aedating directory from the command line.

Change to the directory one up from public_html. This is different on many systems, but as an example:

cd /home/mydomain

Then run the tar command. It will create one file, in the current directory, backing up the public_html directory.

Code:
tar -cvzf public_html.tar.gz public_html
To untar this file, to the current directory, re-creating the sub directories; use the command

Code:
tar -xzf public_html.tar.gz