Backing up whole disk

[T <mlist4suntong@yahoo.com>]

Hi

I tried to backup my whole partition with tar:

  tar -cvzf /mnt/.../cache11.tgz .

but when testing the archive result with 

 tar -tzf /mnt/.../cache11.tgz

It ends with the following error, without explaining what's wrong:

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I thought about it and think the reason might be that I'm backing up to a
vfat volume, which might have some serious limits on file size (but
unfortunately, that's my only backup option now).

If so, how can I backup my nearly 20G partition using vfat volume? 

rar can do multi-volume but can it understand all the special Unix files,
symlink, hard links, named pipes, dev, etc?

tar can do multi-volume too, but "You should only type 'y' after you
have changed the tape; otherwise tar will write over the volume it just
finished.".

Any of the *commonly used* archive tool can achieve this? 

please help. 

thanks