Hi John,
you can deactivate the scheduled backup of courses from "Administration/Backup". No need to split (manually edit) the functions. Then use your Cpanel (or whatever you want) to backup DB, moodle and moodledata dirs safely.
Anyway, the rest of tasks executed by the cron script (deleting old logs, generating rss feeds...) can be very intensive too (but very short!).
Ciao
Backup and restore
admin/cron.php question
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