DEB to TAR.BZ (TBZ) Converter
Convert your deb files to tar.bz online & free
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How to convert DEB to TAR.BZ
Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.
Choose tar.bz or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)
Let the file convert and you can download your tar.bz file right afterwards
About formats
DEB is the software package format used by the Debian project and its numerous derivatives, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other Debian-based Linux distributions. Created alongside the Debian project's founding in August 1993, the format packages compiled software binaries, configuration files, documentation, and installation scripts into a structured archive for automated software management. A DEB file is actually an ar archive containing three members: debian-binary (a text file with the format version), control.tar (metadata including package name, version, dependencies, maintainer scripts), and data.tar (the actual files to install, compressed with gzip, xz, or zstd). The dpkg tool and higher-level package managers like APT handle DEB installation, dependency resolution, upgrades, and removal. One advantage is the sophisticated dependency system — DEB packages declare precise relationships (depends, recommends, suggests, conflicts, replaces) enabling APT to automatically resolve and install entire dependency chains from repositories. The maintainer script system is another strength, allowing packages to execute pre/post installation and removal logic for tasks like creating system users, initializing databases, or registering services. With Debian and Ubuntu powering a substantial share of servers, desktops, and embedded Linux deployments worldwide, DEB is one of the two dominant Linux packaging formats alongside RPM.
TAR.BZ is a compound archive format pairing the TAR archiver with bzip compression. The TAR layer concatenates files into a single stream with full Unix metadata (permissions, ownership, timestamps, symlinks), and the bzip algorithm compresses the resulting stream. The bzip family of compressors uses block-sorting techniques derived from the Burrows-Wheeler transform, which rearranges data to group similar bytes together before applying move-to-front encoding and Huffman compression. This approach typically achieves better compression ratios than gzip/Deflate, particularly on text and source code. TAR.BZ archives are common on Unix and Linux systems for distributing source packages and backups where improved compression over TAR.GZ is desired. One advantage is strong compression on text-heavy data — block-sorting algorithms excel at compressing source code, log files, and structured text, producing meaningfully smaller archives. The two-layer design is another practical strength: the TAR container handles archiving concerns (metadata, directory structure) while the compression layer operates on the full concatenated stream, maximizing cross-file redundancy exploitation. TAR.BZ files can be processed by standard Unix tools and extracted by 7-Zip, WinRAR, and other cross-platform archivers.