Proxmox has made this free utility to backup running OpenVZ containers. It's a great program which is actually just a PERL script but gets the job done. This program is not 100% required because all it really does is cp -a from your container's path as far as I know but it is still good to have uniformity to how you backup your containers.
For RPM distros such as Centos/RHEL/Fedora etc.. download and install this:
wget http://www.proxmox.com/cms_proxm........