ARC to TAR.XZ (TXZ) Converter
Convert your arc files to tar.xz online & free
arc
tar.xz
How to convert ARC to TAR.XZ
Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.
Choose tar.xz 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.XZ is a compound archive format combining TAR) archiving with XZ compression, developed by the Tukaani Project and led by Lasse Collin since 2009. The TAR layer bundles files preserving Unix metadata, and XZ applies LZMA2 compression within a robust container featuring CRC-32 and CRC-64 integrity checks, padding support for media storage, and a stream/block structure enabling parallel decompression. LZMA2 improves on LZMA with better handling of incompressible data and multi-threaded compression support. TAR.XZ has become the preferred distribution format for many open-source projects — the Linux kernel, GNU core utilities, and numerous other packages ship their source tarballs as .tar.xz files. One advantage is the best compression-to-decompression-speed ratio among widely supported formats — XZ achieves compression ratios comparable to 7Z while decompressing faster than bzip2, an ideal combination for software distribution. The built-in integrity verification is another strength: unlike raw LZMA streams, the XZ container includes checksums that detect corruption before data reaches the application layer. GNU tar supports TAR.XZ natively via the -J flag, and xz-utils are packaged in every major Linux distribution. The format has effectively replaced TAR.GZ and TAR.BZ2 as the default for source code distribution in the open-source ecosystem.