I want to back my home folder and compress it (using gzip( to my external HDD. The problem is, in my .wine foler theres the dos device drive and there is a system link that links onto itself. When I try to gzip it just goes into a never ending loop. I olled on google and the man pages. Is there something I can do so it won't follow these links or is there another archiver that will allow me to do this.
Please keep in mind I can't se dd, becayse i plane re-partitioning my hdd.
thank you in advance for your help

you can tar and gzip at the same time. tar archives the link itself rather than the thing it points to, so when you untar, you will get the same link back.

tar cvzf /backup_dir/`date +%F`-backup.tgz ~/

the 'z' in the option list tells tar to gzip also. Alternatively, you could use j to bzip2 (often better compression than gzip, but slower to de/compress), in that case, name the file whatever.tbz for clarity. tar has other options if you're still having problems, namely "--exclude" to just not deal with the problem files all together, though this shouldn't be an issue in your case.