general backup question/tar

[Robert Waldner <Waldner@KPNQwest.at>]

Hi!

At the moment I´m cycling through a few tapes doing backups every 
week or so with
  tar cvz --exclude /proc --exclude /dev --exclude /tmp / >/dev/st0

Are there any precautions I should take that I have forgotten/not yet 
heard about? I can do a recover to someplace (eg /tmp/recover) and get 
the files I need but is this considered good practice or am I missing 
something?

Also, is there a possibility to find out (rather than trying through 
tar tv(Iz)) if a tape is tar.gz, tar.bz2 or plain tar?

Thanks for any advice,
&rw
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