TAR to TAR.LZ (TLZ) Converter
Convert your tar files to tar.lz online & free
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How to convert TAR 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
TAR (Tape Archive) is a Unix archive format originating in Version 7 Unix) at AT&T Bell Labs in January 1979, originally designed for writing file backups to magnetic tape drives. Unlike ZIP or RAR, TAR is a pure archiving format that concatenates multiple files into a single stream without applying compression — each file is preceded by a 512-byte header block containing the filename, permissions, ownership, size, modification time, and checksum, followed by the file data padded to 512-byte boundaries. The format has evolved through several standards: the original V7 format, the POSIX.1-1988 ustar format (extending path lengths and adding support for more file types), and the POSIX.1-2001 pax format supporting extended attributes, arbitrary-length paths, and large file sizes. TAR is almost always paired with a compression tool — gzip (.tar.gz/.tgz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2/.tbz2), xz (.tar.xz), or others — producing a two-layer structure where compression operates on the entire stream for maximum efficiency. One advantage is exceptional Unix metadata fidelity — TAR preserves permissions, ownership, symbolic links, hard links, device files, and extended attributes with greater precision than most competing formats. Universal availability is another core strength: tar is a POSIX-mandated utility present on every Unix-like system, and tools on Windows and macOS handle TAR files natively. TAR remains the standard distribution format for source code, Linux filesystem images, container layers, and system backups.
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.