backing up hard drive manually?

I want to back up my hard drive on my ps3, but my 320 gb fat32 external is corrupt. I'm trying to save some bucks but avoiding having to purchase another external, let alone the instability of a fat32 HDD. Ive been looking at external 2.5" SATA HDD enclosures. I was wondering if I would be able to back it up onto a computer by manually copying and pasting the files into a folder? More importantly would it be a stable recovery to reverse the process?