This is a joke, but honestly anyone here shouldn't be directly backing up their filesystems and should instead be using the right tool for the job. You'll make the world a more efficient place, have more robust and quicker to recover backups, and save some money along the way.
This. It's best to do this in an atomic operation, such as a VSS style snapshot that then is consistent and done with no or paused operations on the files. Something like a zip is generally better because it takes less time on the file system than the upload process typically takes.