TAR to RAR Converter

How to Convert TAR to RAR Online

1. Upload Your TAR File: Drag and drop or click "+ Add Files" to select one or more .tar archives from your device. Batch is supported — drop several tarballs at once.
2. Confirm Output is RAR: RAR is locked as the target extension on this page. The converter will create one .rar per input TAR (Individual Archives mode is the default for archive-to-archive conversions). To merge several inputs into a single output, drop individual files instead via files to RAR.
3. Keep Server Defaults: Our defaults are tuned for a good size/speed balance — current RAR format, dictionary sized for typical inputs, no recovery record by default (you can repack with WinRAR locally if you need one). Settings live under Advanced Options; leave them alone unless you know what you're after.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. The server unpacks each TAR, then re-packs the file tree into RAR with compression applied. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared.

Why Convert TAR to RAR?

TAR (short for tape archive, introduced to Unix in January 1979) is a container, not a compressor — it concatenates files plus their POSIX metadata into a single uncompressed stream. That's why a .tar is typically the same size as the raw bytes inside; gzip/bzip2/xz live in the .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .tar.xz variants. RAR, created by Eugene Roshal in 1993 and now licensed by win.rar GmbH, is the opposite trade-off: a single proprietary format that includes its own compression engine (LZSS + PPMd), AES-256 encryption with filename hiding, optional recovery records, and native multi-volume splitting. Converting plain TAR to RAR is the move when you want all those features without the two-step tar | xz pipeline.

• Compress for the first time — A plain .tar has done zero compression; the bytes inside are sitting raw. Re-packing into RAR routinely cuts text, source code, log, and document trees by 30-70%, and even already-compressed media (JPG, MP4) gets the benefit of a single container with checksums and recovery records. The size win is the headline reason most users convert plain TAR rather than tar.gz.
• One file instead of two-step tar.xz — On Linux you'd normally pipe tar -cf - dir | xz then ship the result; RAR rolls archiving and compression into one format that Windows recipients can extract with a double-click. Useful when you're sending a Linux backup or log bundle to a Windows or macOS user.
• Recovery records protect fragile transport — RAR can embed a recovery record (typically 1-10% of archive size) that lets WinRAR repair partial corruption — a bad block on a USB stick, a truncated download, a flaky optical disc. Plain TAR has no equivalent built-in; one bad sector typically loses every file after it because the stream isn't block-indexed.
• Multi-volume splits that survive transport caps — RAR natively splits into numbered parts (backup.part01.rar, backup.part02.rar,...) at any size you choose. Useful for emailing across Gmail's 25 MB attachment cap or moving backups onto FAT32 thumb drives capped at 4 GB per file. TAR has no native split; split(1) works but loses the self-describing volume structure.
• Stronger encryption with filename hiding — RAR 5 (released April 2013 with WinRAR 5.0) supports AES-256 and, when you set a password, can also encrypt the filename list — so even the archive's table of contents stays private. A plain TAR has no encryption at all; you'd have to wrap it with gpg or openssl separately. RAR 5 also uses BLAKE2 checksums instead of CRC-32 for integrity.
• Solid mode for archive sets that ship together — When you know the recipient will always extract the whole archive (a code release, a game mod, a dataset), RAR's solid mode treats the input as one continuous stream and squeezes out duplication across files. TAR doesn't compress at all, so this gain is purely RAR-side and is often the difference between 100 MB and 60 MB on source-code trees.

TAR vs RAR — Format Comparison

When TAR Beats RAR (and Vice Versa)

Frequently Asked Questions

How much smaller will the RAR be compared to my plain TAR?

It depends entirely on what's inside, because the TAR isn't compressed at all. For text, source code, JSON, CSVs, and uncompressed documents expect 50-80% size reduction — a 100 MB .tar of code commonly lands around 20-40 MB as .rar. For already-compressed media (JPG, PNG, MP4, MP3, DOCX, XLSX), the gain is small or zero because the bytes are already near their entropy floor; you may shave 1-3% from container overhead and nothing more.

Why does this take longer than I'd expect for "just changing the extension"?

Because TAR contains uncompressed byte streams and RAR is a compression format — the converter has to read every entry out of the TAR and feed it through RAR's compression engine. There's no shortcut. A "fast" tool that only rewrote the container would produce an RAR the same size as the TAR, which defeats the point. Expect roughly the same time as if you'd run rar a out.rar locally on the same files.

Will Linux file permissions, owners, and symlinks survive the conversion?

Mostly. RAR 5 stores Unix file attributes and symlinks, and our converter passes them through from the TAR. Where it gets fuzzy is owner/group: RAR stores UID/GID as numeric values, and they'll only be meaningful on a target system that has the same users defined. If you're staging a backup to restore on a different machine, plan to chown after extraction. Hard links inside a tarball are preserved by RAR 5 but de-duplicated differently from how TAR encodes them. For a faithful round-trip of all POSIX metadata, TAR to TAR.GZ keeps the original tar semantics with gzip compression layered on.

Can macOS and Linux users open the RAR I send them without buying WinRAR?

Yes, for extraction. macOS users install The Unarchiver or Keka (both free on the Mac App Store). Linux users install unrar (non-free) or unar/unrar-free (free, more limited on RAR 5) from their distro. Apple's built-in Archive Utility handles ZIP, GZIP, and TAR but does not open RAR. What's licensed is creating RAR archives — that requires WinRAR or another RarLab-licensed tool, which is exactly the friction this converter removes.

Should I have left the TAR alone and used tar.gz or tar.xz instead?

If your recipient is on Linux and you want maximum compatibility, yes — TAR to TAR.GZ or TAR to TAR.XZ keep the POSIX semantics intact and compress well (xz often matches RAR on ratio for text). RAR makes more sense when the recipient is on Windows, when you specifically want recovery records or multi-volume splits, or when you need filename encryption. There's no universally correct answer — it's a recipient-environment decision.

Is RAR 5 the same as RAR4 (legacy)?

No. RAR 5 launched with WinRAR 5.0 in April 2013 and uses a different on-disk format with AES-256, BLAKE2 checksums, larger dictionary sizes (up to 1 GB in 64-bit WinRAR 5; WinRAR 7 raised that to 64 GB), and improved recovery records. RAR 4 is the older format and uses AES-128 with weaker CRC-32 integrity. Most modern extractors (WinRAR 5+, 7-Zip 15.06+, The Unarchiver) handle both. Our converter outputs RAR with current defaults; very old extractors (pre-2013) may not read it.

What if I want maximum compression and don't care about RAR specifically?

7z (LZMA2) generally edges out RAR on raw ratio, sometimes by another 5-10% on text and source code. Try convert TAR to 7z when pure size is the goal and your recipient has a modern extractor (7-Zip is free on Windows, Keka on macOS, p7zip on Linux). Stay with RAR when you specifically need recovery records or first-class multi-volume splits.

What's the reverse direction?

Use convert RAR to TAR when you need to feed an RAR archive into a Unix toolchain that expects tar streams, or extract RAR if you just want the files out and don't need to re-archive. Going RAR → TAR loses RAR's recovery record and solid-mode benefit but restores native POSIX tooling compatibility.

Do I need to provide a password if my TAR isn't encrypted?

No. Plain TAR has no native encryption, so there's nothing to unlock on the input side. If you want the output RAR to be encrypted, that's a setting on the RAR side — you can repack with a password locally in WinRAR after downloading, or use a tool that exposes RAR's encryption controls directly. Re-encrypting at the RAR layer gives you AES-256 plus filename hiding, both of which a plain TAR can't provide.