backing up huge folders

[jake66]

i have a folder on my website that contains 3300+ photos. currently, i back it up by copying the folder to my desktop then burning it to a disk.

is there a quicker way to do this? such as compressing it somehow, before i copy it to my desktop?

[rocknbil]

On what OS? If Linux, google for the tar command.

You should not have 3300 files in one directory. This will slow things down greatly, you should break those up into subdirectories, even [dir]/a [dir]/b is better than one big dump like that.