tar is a unix utility used to archive a collection of files into an archive. Usually the archive is zipped by gzip for efficient storage. A tar archive is often referred to as a tarball
tar -cvzf nameofarchive.tar.gz <list of files and directories to include>
tar -xvzf nameofarchive.tar.gz
The default behaviour for symbolic links is to archive them as the links to the appropriate part of the file system. You can for a symbolic link to be substituted for a file by using the -h switch (or –dereference):
tar -cvzfh nameofarchive.tar.gz <list of files and directories to include>