Backup and entire dir using tar?

[Bob Nielsen]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 05:13:23PM -0800, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 06:53:38 +0800, Senectus . <senectus at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I want to tar up an entire directory and all the sub dir's in it as by
> > keeping all the permissions and structures as is..
> > I'm having a bugger of a time figuring out how it works.. whats the
> > best practice for tar.gz a dir with all sub dir for later restore..?
> 
> to create:
>   tar -cvf backup.tar   directory_to_backup
> 
> to extract:
>  tar -xvf backup.tar
> 

The question was about tar.gz, so that would change to

 to create:
   tar -cvzf backup.tar.gz   directory_to_backup

 to extract:
  tar -xvzf backup.tar.gz