I'm trying to compress a folder into a .7z archive. This folder contains symbolic links to some other stuff outside the folder (both directories and files).

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 (so if there is a symlink name "foo" which points to "C:\stuff\foo" I want it to include the "C:\stuff\foo" stuff in the archive in place of foo, not a "0 byte" symlink...

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... I'm thinking mayby a program that creates a staging folder with the real files in it then passes that to 7zip, or just an archiver that does handle them better?