Creating Remote Tarballs

[mjc]

Is there a way to create a locally tar ball of a remote server / directory?

For example, remote Server-A, has directories A to D that I'd like to have a tarball created; from Server-B, is there a way to create the tar-ball of Server-A and its' directories? Another option is from Server-A, can I create a tar-ball of Server-A onto Server-B?

Thanks in advance

[tpl]

can you mount the server file systems locally via NFS?
If so, then it's easy: suppose server A is mounted on
/A whilst server B is mounted on /B: then use tar's
"-O" option--extract files to standard output--like so:

cd /; tar -O cf A.tar /A >/B

that should put A.tar on server B.