Brian Cuttler wrote:

When I tried a restore yesterday I found that the files I brought
back had a long numeric number preceeding the original path. I will
try a restore again when the current amdump run completes to see if
this is still the case. Is this normal, or perhaps an artifact of
not having a proper/correct verion gtar ?

This is a well known indication of "bad" version of GNU tar.

--
Toomas Aas