TGZ (TAR.GZ) to TAR.BZ (TBZ) Converter
Convert your tgz files to tar.bz online & free
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How to convert TGZ 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)
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About formats
TGZ (also written as .tar.gz) is the most widely used compound archive format on Unix-like systems, combining TAR) archiving with gzip compression. Gzip was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler, first released on October 31, 1992 as a free, patent-unencumbered replacement for the Unix compress utility. The TAR layer bundles files with full Unix metadata (permissions, ownership, timestamps, symlinks, hard links) into a single sequential stream, and gzip compresses it using the Deflate algorithm — a combination of LZ77 dictionary matching and Huffman coding. The resulting .tar.gz or .tgz file is the standard format for distributing source code, creating system backups, and packaging software on Linux and Unix platforms. One advantage is near-universal support — TGZ files can be created and extracted on every Unix system, Windows (via 7-Zip, WinRAR), and macOS natively, making it the safest choice when the recipient's platform is unknown. Fast decompression is another practical strength: gzip extraction is significantly faster than bzip2 or xz, important for CI/CD pipelines, container image layers, and automated deployments where extraction time matters. GNU tar supports TGZ natively with the -z flag, and the format serves as the basis for many higher-level packaging systems. While XZ offers better compression ratios, TGZ remains the default choice when broad compatibility and extraction speed are priorities.
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.