A great feature of cPanel is not only being able to do your own backups but also being able to choose which type.

If you look on the Index page of your cPanel under Disk Space Usage, you can see how much Web space is used by your account. Cut the amount in half and you get an idea of how big your download will be. With a decent Cable or DSL connection, you can download approx. 10 MB every minute or minute and a half. A download will use the 'tar.gz' extension so make sure you have a Zip program that can work with it.