I'm a fan of tar. It will preserve hardlinks and softlinks. The command you can use for your situation is as follows.
cd /var tar cvzf ~/Recording.tgz Recording
That creates a gzipped file called Recording.tgz with verbose output of the directory Recording. Paths will be preserved. There are lots of options that go with tar that you can review in the man pages. To restore your files, change to the directory were you want to put them and run tar again using the following command.
tar xvzf ~/Recording.tgz
To see what the file has in it prior to untarring, simply type
tar tvzf ~/Recording.tgz