ACE to TAR.Z (TZ) Converter
Convert your ace files to tar.z online & free
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How to convert ACE to TAR.Z
Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.
Choose tar.z or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)
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About formats
ACE is a proprietary compressed archive format created by Marcel Lemke around 1998, primarily associated with the WinACE) archiver for Windows. The format gained popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s due to its strong compression ratios, which were competitive with RAR and often superior to ZIP on many data types. ACE archives support multiple compression levels, solid archiving (treating multiple files as a single stream for better ratios), multi-volume splitting for distribution across size-limited media, recovery records for repairing damaged archives, and password protection. The format uses a proprietary compression algorithm that combines dictionary-based and statistical methods, optimized for general-purpose file compression with particular effectiveness on executable files and structured data. One advantage was the compression efficiency — ACE frequently produced smaller archives than contemporary ZIP implementations, making it popular for file distribution on bandwidth-constrained dial-up era internet. The solid archive mode provided another strength by exploiting redundancy across multiple files, substantially reducing total archive size when bundling files with similar content. WinACE development ceased in the mid-2000s, and a critical vulnerability#Security) discovered in 2019 in the widely-used unacev2.dll library led many archiving tools to drop ACE support. The format is primarily encountered today in legacy archives from its peak usage period.
TAR.Z is a compound archive format combining TAR) archiving with Unix compress, one of the earliest general-purpose data compression tools available on Unix systems. The compress utility, originally written by Spencer Thomas, Joe Orost, and others around 1985, implements adaptive LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) compression — a dictionary-based algorithm that builds a translation table during compression and decompression. The TAR layer bundles files with full Unix metadata into a single stream, and compress reduces the stream size typically by 40-60%. TAR.Z was the standard compressed archive format on Unix systems throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, before gzip emerged as a patent-free replacement. The LZW algorithm used by compress) was subject to patent claims by Unisys (holders of the LZW patent through Sperry), which motivated the development of gzip as an unencumbered alternative. One advantage is universal legacy compatibility — TAR.Z files can be extracted on any Unix system, including very old installations where newer compression tools may not be available. The format's historical ubiquity means that decades of archived software, documentation, and system backups exist as TAR.Z files. While TAR.GZ and TAR.XZ have replaced TAR.Z for new archives, the uncompress/zcat tools remain standard on all Unix-like systems, ensuring continued accessibility of legacy archives.