Backup and entire dir using tar?

[Daniel Robitaille]

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