If I used tar to archive Time Machine's Backups.backupdb folder, can the resulting file be uploaded to a cloud service and later used without issues?

If I were to use tar -xvf to create an archived .tar file of the Backups.backupdb folder Time Machine creates, would it sufficiently preserve hard links, etc? For example, if I uploaded to, say Google Drive, and later downloaded it in the future and extracted it to a new drive, would the extracted folder still be readable my Time Machine? Or would the safer route be imaging the entire drive?