“Your Linux system actually has a number of options for doing
backups. The most popular commands are cpio and tar. Other
command-line tools such as dd, dump and afio are available
(although afio might not be included in your distribution). tar and
cpio are still quite useful and powerful, and are the ones I
usually use myself.”
“The main advantage of cpio over tar is that it does
somewhat better packing of data on your backup medium and it
handles errors better as well, particularly when dealing with
tape. There is one other advantage. When using tar, you tend
to work in terms of short lists of directories or files. With cpio,
you can largely customize the files that wind up in an
archive.”
“Linux’s tar isn’t your plain old tar; it’s GNU tar. This means
you have some advantages, making it that much more interesting. For
instance, GNU tar makes it possible to do compression on the fly
(with both standard compression and gzip compression). You can also
specify multi-volume backups.”