To create a tar.gz archive from a given folder you can use the following command
tar -zcvf tar-archive-name.tar.gz source-folder-name
This will compress the contents of source-folder-name to a tar.gz archive named tar-archive-name.tar.gz
To extract a tar.gz compressed archive you can use the following command
tar -zxvf tar-archive-name.tar.gz
to compress a directory with saved permissions:
tar -pczf archive.tar.gz folder