I noticed that the save files of these games can't be copied manually because they're are copy protected. Know what that means? If you HDD crashes, your ps3 breaks or your save file corrupts, you're screwed.

I understand that these events are rare but two of those 3 possible event have happened to me so I'm paranoid now and back up my saves every week on an SD card.

The backup utility is the only way to back up these saves but the problem with using that is that it takes forever because it backs up everything. If you have lots of movies and an oersized HDD like mine (320gb), you may not even have an external HDD to fit the back up.

Why am I paranoid? My ps3 broke before and I had to revert to the old state when I backed up my HDD about two months earlier while upgrading the HDD. i lost a lost of game progress in multiple games. The most painful was soul calibur iv because you online data is on your save file as well and uploads to the leaderboards when you log in. How do I know? When I restored my ps3 after the 3 weeks it took sony to fix it, all my stats in those two months evaporated and I dropped from #3 on the special vs leaderboards to #24. I started playing like a maniac again and got back up to #6 on the leaderboards only to have my save file corrupt on me this time. The lesson I learned from that was to back up my saves every week.

However, now I can't do that and it seems like the new trend is for game saves to be copy protected since these are my 2 newest games. I can't understand the need for copy protection since other games simply attach you save file to your psn.  I'm hoping for a way around this without a full back up and if someone can tell me, I'll really appreciate it.

that happened with my xbox but i didnt save anything to my backup

Just create new save files within the game.

Won't work for games like Sf4 and KZ2 whre you have no control over the saving process. Also,this doesn't deal with the effect of HDD corruption

That does kind of suck, hope nothing happens to my PS3.