Make sure you tar these directories up using relative links
eg rather than When you untar them again, change into the directory you want them to go to, then run the tar xf to unpack.
By default tar extracts files into the cirrent dir - unless you have used absolute paths when creating the tar, in which case it depends on the implementation of tar as to what it will do.

tar xvf {filename} will tar the file in current directory.
If you want to extract in some other directory, cd to that directory and type
tar xvf {PATH}/{filename}
and the untarred file will be created in pwd

actually I just want to add. For safety reasons whenever you tar anything always try to have the practice to specify relative instead of absolute path.

example:
absolute path will be tar cf /tmp/abc.tar /etc
relative path will be tar cf /tmp/xyz.tar ./etc <-- "."

The danger of using absolute path is when you un-tar the file it will overwrite existing folder.


example:
cd /tmp
tar xf abc.tar will extract and overwrite existing /etc
tar xf xyz.tar will extract into /tmp only