support wrote:
> 
> Hmm,
>     A tad bit more information. I'm wondering if it is an issue with gnutar?
> Seems we have gnutar version 1.12 on all of our "working" servers, but 1.13
> on the server that is having troubles with the backups?

Don't use 1.13.  Use 1.13.25 (which used to be on alpha.gnu.org, you may
have to google for it).

The text below is more readable on http://www.amanda.org/patches.html
and has some working links.

GNU tar 1.12: there are two known problems (described below) that can be
fixed by applying tar-1.12.patch,
     available in AMANDA distributions since release 2.4.0b5. 
          On SunOS 4.1.3, HP/UX and possibly other systems, GNU tar 1.12
will report incorrect output sizes, because
          printf does not understand "%llu". 
          GNU tar 1.12 would report Bad file number error messages at
estimate-time for sparse files. 
     GNU tar 1.13: even though the second problem in release 1.12 is
already fixed in 1.13, the other is only partially fixed.
     Besides, there are a couple of other problems in release 1.13,
related with exclude patterns and restoring, so its use is
     not recommended. Hopefully, all of these problems will be fixed in
GNU tar 1.14. 
     GNU tar 1.13.18: This patch fixes two problems in tar-1.13.18: 
          A workaround for a bug in fnmatch from glibc. 
          A bug that can cause a core dump.