RAR to TAR Converter

Convert RAR to TAR: What This Guide Covers

A .tar is a bundle, not a compressor — it staples files together and records their Unix metadata, and that is all. This page walks through turning a proprietary .rar into a plain tarball, explains the one result that surprises everyone (the tar is bigger than the RAR), and lists the cases where the conversion fails so you can spot them before you upload.

How to Convert RAR to TAR

1. Upload Your RAR File: Drag the .rar onto the page or click "Add Files" to browse. Only .rar is accepted here; the picker will not take .zip or .7z.
2. Leave the Output Set to TAR: The output extension is fixed on this page. There is no compression-level control, because a plain tar has nothing to compress.
3. Check the Combine Setting: On an archive-to-archive page the only mode offered is Individual Archives, and it is already selected. Upload three RAR files and you get three separate .tar files back, one per source.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and download the tarball. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: What Actually Happens to Your Archive

The conversion is a two-stage extract-and-repack. Your RAR is unpacked with unrar, the extracted tree is swept for unsafe entries, and then the surviving top-level items are handed to tar from inside that directory. Nothing is re-encoded — the bytes of each contained file are identical on the way out.

The tarball we produce is in GNU tar format, identifiable by the ustar␣␣\0 magic at byte offset 257 of the first header block. Here is what that format carries through, entry by entry:

Why the TAR Is Bigger Than the RAR

This is the single most common surprise, and it is not an error. Packing the same 853-file, 5.71 MB source tree with the commands this converter runs gave us:

A tar is larger than the sum of its contents, not just larger than the RAR: every entry is padded up to a 512-byte boundary and the whole file is rounded up to GNU tar's default 20-block (10,240-byte) record size. That floor is why a .tar holding a single three-byte file still weighs exactly 10,240 bytes. If you want a small file, pick a compressed tarball instead — tar.gz for speed and ubiquity, tar.bz2 as the middle ground, or tar.xz for the smallest result.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The conversion failed and I got nothing back" — the most likely cause by far is a password-protected RAR. There is no password field on this page, so an encrypted archive cannot be opened; the extractor stops at its password prompt and the job ends without an output. Decrypt it with WinRAR, 7-Zip or unrar on your own computer, then upload the plain archive.
• "I uploaded archive.part01.rar and it failed" — multi-volume RAR sets need every volume available simultaneously, and this page processes one uploaded file at a time. unrar extracts what fits in the first volume, then aborts with a missing-volume error. Join the set on your own machine first (unrar x archive.part01.rar with all parts in one folder), re-archive the result, and upload that.
• "A folder is missing from my tar" — check whether it was named dev, proc or sys. A post-extraction security sweep removes directories with those names at any depth, because malicious archives use them to smuggle virtual-filesystem entries. Rename the folder before archiving.
• "My symlinks turned up missing" — the same sweep deletes symbolic links, device nodes, named pipes and sockets. Only regular files and directories reach the tarball. Dereference the links (cp -rL) before archiving if the targets matter.
• "Job rejected on a huge archive" — the extracted contents must stay under 5 GB and under 50,000 entries. A compact RAR of a giant disk image or a node_modules tree can breach either ceiling even though the upload itself was small.
• "Windows says it cannot open the .tar" — File Explorer only gained native TAR extraction in Windows 11 24H2. On anything older, use 7-Zip, or the bundled command-line tar.exe, which has shipped since Windows 10 build 17063.

When a Plain TAR Is the Wrong Target

If your goal is "make this archive smaller" or "make this easy for a non-technical recipient", a bare tarball is the wrong answer — it is bigger than what you started with and Windows support is recent. Reach for a plain .tar only when something downstream expects one: a build system that pipes it into its own compressor, a Docker build context, a tar-consuming deployment script, or a storage layer that dedupes better on uncompressed streams. If you simply want the files out of the RAR rather than into a different archive, skip the conversion entirely and use the RAR extractor.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does converting RAR to TAR lose any data?

No. Both formats are lossless containers. The RAR is expanded to its original bytes and those exact bytes are written into the tarball, so anything you extract afterwards is bit-for-bit identical to what the RAR held. Only the wrapper changes.

Does the TAR preserve file permissions from the RAR?

The permission bits, yes, when the source RAR recorded them — which is the case for archives created on Linux or macOS. The tar header stores the mode alongside the path, timestamp and owner fields. Ownership is a different matter: files are extracted as the conversion service's user, so the uid/gid written into the tar are ours, not yours. On extraction that rarely matters, since only root applies stored ownership.

How do I extract the TAR after downloading it?

On Linux or macOS, tar -xf yourfile.tar in the folder where you want the contents. Add -p to force exact permission restoration if you are extracting as root. On Windows 11 24H2, double-click it in File Explorer; on earlier Windows, use 7-Zip or run tar -xf yourfile.tar in a Command Prompt.

Can I merge several RAR archives into one TAR?

Not on this page. Archive-to-archive conversions run in Individual Archives mode, which is the only mode offered here — every uploaded .rar produces its own .tar. To end up with one bundle, extract the RARs on your own computer, put everything in a single folder, and re-archive that.

Is .tar the same thing as .tar.gz without the compression?

Yes, exactly. A .tar.gz is a .tar that has been fed through gzip as a single stream — gunzip a .tar.gz and you get back precisely the kind of file this page produces. That layering is also why a compressed tarball cannot be read partially: the gzip stream has to be decompressed from the start to reach any entry, whereas a plain .tar can be scanned block by block.

Why does the TAR contain a folder I do not recognise, or lack one I do?

The tarball mirrors whatever the RAR's internal layout was — if the RAR wrapped everything in a top-level folder, so does the tar; if it held loose files at its root, the tar does too. The one asymmetry is the security sweep, which strips symlinks, device nodes, and directories named dev, proc or sys. Nothing else is added or removed.

Will the TAR open on a Mac?

Yes. macOS has shipped a BSD tar for its entire history and Archive Utility opens .tar on double-click. Extended attributes and resource forks that the original files may have had on macOS are not carried through, though — they were already lost when the files were put into the RAR, not by this conversion.

Does timestamp information survive the round trip?

Modification times do, to one-second resolution — a file stamped 2011 comes out of the tar stamped 2011. Creation and access times do not: neither the RAR nor the GNU tar header format we emit carries them in a way that survives extraction on a typical Unix filesystem.

What is the difference between this and the RAR converter hub?

This page is hard-wired to a single output. The RAR converter hub lets you pick the target format from a dropdown instead, which is the better starting point if you are still deciding between .tar, a compressed tarball, .7z and .zip.