Backing up freebsd to 1 file?

[J.D. Bronson]

I have a freebsd 8.0 install and was wondering if it is possible to tar 
up the entire install...for backup purposes.

# cd /
# tar -cvf backup.tar {list of directories}

then I can ftp the tar file out to another machine.

This works in theory, but if I need to do a restore tar complains
on 'tar -xpf backup.tar'.

Under OpenBSD, this works as expected. It has given me an easy way
to backup/move/restore or anything I want to do w/o complaining.

I am running Freebsd on a machine that has no other drives/tapes or 
anything so my options for backup are limited.

All I am trying to do is get a complete image (or snapshot) of my entire 
install on this machine and then if I needed to reload or reinstall, I 
could do a bare bones freebsd install, copy over the tar'd up file and 
extract it from within / and then reboot an I would be go to go.

Thoughts on this would be appreciated...



-- 
J.D. Bronson