Symbolic links and 7zip

Solution 1:

Apparently 7zip just archives the link it's self which is not what I intended. Is there a way to tell 7zip that I want it to archive the stuff that it links too, not the link its self

No, apparently not (unfortunately). There is actually a bug report on 7zip requesting this: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2846755&group_id=14481&atid=114481 but it was opened in August 2009 and not touched since :-/.

Failing that is there any reasonable around it, apart from adding the files and folders in question? Including the stuff through the symlink there's like 10 000 files, the large proportion of which are via symlinks so adding them all individually would take hours...

Well, if you have enough space (and time), you can make copy of the folder, replacing the symlinks with their targets. You can e.g. use Robocopy and its switch /sl:

/sl Copies the symbolic link instead of the target

Note: Just to avoid confusion, note that the Linux build of p7zip (a port of 7zip) also has a binary 7z which does support archiving the file a symbolic link points to (switch -l). However, 7zip on Windows does not have this switch.

Solution 2:

As of 2019, 7-Zip has resolved this issue in Windows. The latest version has a checkbox to include symlinks in TAR and WIM archives and it works great!