I was tinkering with the tar and cpio commands on my personal system in order to back the contents of my /home directory.
I have a drive on my computer that i just use for storage so the tar command I used was
tar cf /home /dev/hdb
It seemed to work but failed when I attempted to restore the data, I was not able to view the archive from the command line or the GUI when I went to the mount point of the drive.

for cpio I used the following....
find /home -print | cpio -o /dev/hdb
again it seemed to work but I was not able to view the resulting archive and the restore command
cpio -idv < /dev/hdb seemed to work with no errors but I tried to restore it in a spot so I could actually see the entire directory structure.
Any suggestions?

I sometimes use tar to back up and I have to do it this way:

tar -c -v -f /path_of_output (archive)_file /path_of_what_I_want_to_backup/*

Versions of tar differ, but I think this is pretty much required no matter what version you use. With my system, specifying a device rather than a path would not work, and I do have to specify the location for the archive file, and then the location of the stuff I want to work with.

/dev/hdb is a very general term. If there is a partition there, it has a number (1, 2, etc). Try running it again, but this time, complete the command: /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdb2, whatever the partition number is.
If you are not sure of the number, check /etc/fstab. It should be there.