recovering a single directory from a tar archive

[Marvin Blackburn]

I have a single rhel 2.1 es systems that has an attached tape drive.
I need a good way to back it up, and I was thinking tar would work.
However, I often have to recover directories and there are too many files to
list individually.
Is there an easy way to get a particular directory.

Or is there another mechanism for backing up that would alleviate this
problem.  I have considered amanda; however it seems to be a bit of overkill
just for one system.

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Marvin Blackburn
Systems Administrator
Glen Raven
"He's no failure.  He's not dead yet" --William Lloyd George