How to use TAR for backup [Oracle_Home]

NAME
tar - The GNU version of the tar archiving utility

SYNOPSIS
tar [ - ] A --catenate --concatenate | c --create | d --diff --compare
| --delete | r --append | t --list | u --update | x --extract --get [
options ] pathname [ pathname ... ]

DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents the GNU version of tar , an archiving pro-
gram designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as
a tarfile. A tarfile may be made on a tape drive, however, it is also
common to write a tarfile to a normal file. The first argument to tar
must be one of the options: Acdrtux, followed by any optional func-
tions. The final arguments to tar are the names of the files or direc-
tories which should be archived. The use of a directory name always
implies that the subdirectories below should be included in the
archive.

EXAMPLES
tar -xvvf foo.tar
extract foo.tar

tar -xvvzf foo.tar.gz
extract gzipped foo.tar.gz

tar -cvvf foo.tar foo/
tar contents of folder foo in foo.tar

For more:
http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?tar