ARC to TAR.LZ (TLZ) Converter
Convert your arc files to tar.lz online & free
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How to convert ARC to TAR.LZ
Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.
Choose tar.lz or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)
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About formats
ARC is one of the earliest widely-used compressed archive formats for personal computers, created by Thom Henderson of System Enhancement Associates (SEA) in 1985 for MS-DOS. The format combines multiple files into a single archive with per-file compression, supporting several compression methods including no compression (stored), run-length encoding, Huffman coding, and LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) variants. Each file entry in an ARC archive carries its own header with the original filename, compressed and uncompressed sizes, timestamp, CRC checksum, and compression method indicator. ARC became the dominant archive format on DOS-based bulletin board systems (BBS) during the mid-1980s, serving as the primary means of distributing software, documents, and data files online before the internet era. The format sparked a notable legal controversy when Phil Katz created a compatible utility (PKARC), leading to a lawsuit from SEA that ultimately motivated Katz to develop the ZIP format as a legal alternative. One advantage of ARC was its per-file compression approach, allowing individual files to be extracted without decompressing the entire archive. The integrated CRC checksums provided another benefit, enabling reliable verification of data integrity after transfer over error-prone modem connections. While ZIP and more modern formats supplanted ARC by the early 1990s, the format holds historical significance as a foundational technology in the evolution of data compression and file distribution.
TAR.LZ is a compound archive format combining TAR archiving with lzip compression, a format created by Antonio Diaz Diaz and first released in 2009. The TAR layer bundles files with full Unix metadata into a single stream, and lzip applies LZMA compression with a robust container that includes per-member CRC-32 integrity checking and clean member boundaries. Lzip was designed with long-term archival in mind — it produces a simple, well-documented format with strong error recovery properties: if part of a TAR.LZ file is corrupted, undamaged members can still be extracted, unlike monolithic compressed streams where corruption propagates. The compression ratios are essentially identical to LZMA/XZ since lzip uses the same LZMA algorithm. One advantage is archival resilience — the member-based structure means a multi-part archive can survive partial corruption without losing all data, critical for long-term storage. The clean, minimal format design is another strength: lzip has a simple specification that independent implementations can follow precisely, reducing the risk of compatibility issues over decades of archival. TAR.LZ is used by the GNU Project for distributing source releases and is supported by GNU tar with the --lzip flag, as well as by plzip for parallel compression on multi-core systems.