Free Online TAR Converter
TAR bundles files together without compressing any of them.
TAR files · up to 50 MB each · 100 MB with a free account
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Checking files and selected output formats.
How to convert TAR archives online
Convert Unix TAR archives to compressed formats, or re-package them for Windows and Mac users.
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Upload your TAR archive
Drag and drop TAR files, including .tar.gz (tgz), .tar.bz2, and .tar.xz compressed tarballs. Unix file permissions, symlinks, and directory structure are read from the archive.
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Select your output format
Choose ZIP for easy extraction on Windows and Mac, 7Z for maximum compression with LZMA2, or RAR for recovery records. TAR alone has no compression, so any target format will also compress the contents.
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Download compressed archive
Download your re-packaged archive with all files and folders intact. Converting from uncompressed TAR to ZIP or 7Z adds compression, significantly reducing the overall archive size.
Reasons to convert TAR archives
Windows and Mac users often cannot extract TAR archives without additional software. Convert TAR to ZIP for an archive that opens with a double-click on every operating system.
TAR by itself stores files without any compression. Convert TAR to ZIP, 7Z, or RAR to both bundle and compress your files, reducing the overall archive size significantly.
Convert TAR to 7Z for the best compression ratio using LZMA2. For collections of similar files (source code, documents), 7Z's solid compression can achieve 60-80% size reduction.
TAR is a Unix tool unfamiliar to most Windows and Mac users. Convert to ZIP so recipients can extract files without learning command-line tools or installing third-party archive utilities.
Many file sharing services and email providers do not recognize TAR or TAR.GZ. Convert to ZIP for universal acceptance on Dropbox, Google Drive, WeTransfer, and email attachments.
Convert TAR archives online, no WinRAR, no 7-Zip, no downloads. Files up to 100 MB are always free, and files are deleted from our servers within 1 hour.
About the TAR Format
TAR (Tape Archive) is a Unix file archiving format created in 1979 for writing data to sequential tape drives. Unlike ZIP or 7Z, TAR does not compress files on its own, it simply bundles multiple files and directories into a single archive while preserving Unix file permissions, ownership, timestamps, and symbolic links. This makes TAR the standard choice for software distribution and system backups on Linux and macOS.
TAR is almost always paired with a compression tool: TAR.GZ (gzip) is the most common combination, offering good speed and reasonable compression. TAR.BZ2 (bzip2) achieves better compression at the cost of slower processing, while TAR.XZ (xz/LZMA2) produces the smallest archives. Because TAR preserves the full Unix filesystem metadata that ZIP discards, it remains essential for packaging source code, deploying server configurations, and creating system images where file permissions must survive the round trip.