TAR.XZ to TGZ Converter

How to Convert TAR.XZ to TGZ Online

1. Upload Your TAR.XZ File: Drag and drop your .tar.xz (or .txz) archive, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Batch upload is supported — drop several archives in at once.
2. Pick Combine Mode: Default is Single Archive, which repacks every upload into one combined .tgz. Switch to Individual Archives to get a separate .tgz per input — useful when you want each release artifact to stay isolated.
3. Adjust Output Filename (Optional): Rename the output before download if you want a specific tag (e.g. myproject-1.4.tgz). The repack preserves the inner TAR's file paths, permissions, and timestamps — only the outer compression layer changes.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. xconvert decompresses the LZMA2 outer layer, then recompresses the underlying TAR with gzip (DEFLATE) and hands back a standard .tgz (a.k.a. .tar.gz).

Why Convert TAR.XZ to TGZ?

TAR.XZ wraps a tar archive in XZ Utils LZMA2 compression (specification published January 14, 2009), while TGZ wraps the same tar payload in gzip DEFLATE compression (released October 31, 1992 by Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler). The TAR contents — file paths, permissions, ownership, timestamps — are identical; only the outer compression layer differs. Going XZ → gzip trades a smaller file for a faster, more universally supported one.

• Older systems and shell scripts — Plain BusyBox, embedded BSD, and stripped-down container images often ship gzip but not xz. A .tgz extracts with tar -xzf on any POSIX system going back decades; tar -xJf needs xz-utils installed.
• Faster decompression for end users — On the standard 580 MB Linux-kernel benchmark, gzip decompressed in ~6 s vs ~11 s for XZ at default level 6 (RootUsers benchmark). For artifacts downloaded by many people, gzip's lower CPU cost adds up.
• CI/CD and container build caches — Docker layer caches, GitHub Actions artifacts, and most npm/PyPI mirrors default to gzip because extraction speed dominates over storage size. A .tgz is the lowest-friction format to drop into a build pipeline.
• Compatibility with legacy package managers — Slackware historically used .tgz for its packages before switching to .txz in version 13.0 (2009); converting back to .tgz keeps the package readable by older Slackware utilities and third-party tools that never adopted XZ.
• Streaming and HTTP delivery — Web servers and CDNs natively handle gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip), so a .tgz can be streamed and decompressed inline. XZ has no equivalent transport encoding.
• Avoiding the xz-utils supply-chain concern — After the March 2024 CVE-2024-3094 backdoor disclosure in upstream xz-utils, some teams locked their build pipelines to gzip-only. Repacking inbound .tar.xz archives as .tgz is one mitigation step.

TAR.XZ vs TGZ — Format Comparison

Benchmarks above from RootUsers gzip-vs-xz comparison on a 580 MB source corpus at each tool's default compression level.

Compression Tradeoff Quick Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the files inside my archive change when I convert TAR.XZ to TGZ?

No. The inner TAR stream is identical — file paths, Unix permissions (mode bits), owner/group IDs, and modification timestamps all carry over byte-for-byte. Only the outer compression layer is swapped from LZMA2 to gzip's DEFLATE, so tar -tzf output.tgz will list the exact same entries as tar -tJf input.tar.xz.

How much larger will my TGZ be compared to the original TAR.XZ?

For typical source-code or document archives, expect the .tgz to be roughly 40-60% larger than the .tar.xz. On the canonical 580 MB Linux kernel benchmark, gzip compressed to 21.3% of original vs XZ's 14.4% — so the gzip output is about 1.5x the XZ size. Heavily binary or already-compressed payloads (JPEGs, MP4s) will show a smaller gap because neither algorithm compresses them well.

Is .tgz the same as .tar.gz?

Yes, exactly the same — .tgz is just the short-form extension. Both filenames decode to a gzip-compressed TAR archive with identical bytes. The longer .tar.gz is more common on Linux servers; the four-letter .tgz was originally used because some older filesystems (notably FAT on DOS/Windows) only supported one extension at a time.

Can I go back from TGZ to TAR.XZ later?

Yes. Run the reverse conversion at tgz to tar.xz. The recompression is lossless in the sense that the inner TAR is preserved, but you'll lose XZ's integrity checksums (CRC-64 / SHA-256) from the original and pick up gzip's CRC-32 instead. If those checksums matter, keep a copy of the original.

Do I need xz-utils installed to do this conversion?

Not on xconvert — the LZMA2 decompression and gzip recompression both run server-side, so your machine only needs a browser. If you wanted to do it locally instead, the one-liner is xz -dc input.tar.xz | gzip -9 > output.tgz, which requires both xz-utils and gzip on your PATH.

Why does the conversion take a few seconds even for small archives?

Decompressing the LZMA2 layer is the slow step — XZ decompression is roughly 80% slower than gzip decompression at default settings, and it has to fully decode the stream before gzip can re-encode the TAR. For a 100 MB .tar.xz you should expect 5-15 seconds depending on server load; the gzip recompress itself is near-instant.

What gzip compression level does xconvert use?

The default repack targets level 6 — gzip's standard, which is what most distros and CI tools produce by default. This gives a good balance: typically within 1-2% of gzip's maximum (level 9) compression ratio, at roughly half the CPU cost. The output is byte-compatible with any gunzip, tar -xzf, or Content-Encoding: gzip consumer.

Will Windows tools open the resulting .tgz?

Yes. 7-Zip, PeaZip, and WinRAR all handle .tgz and .tar.gz natively, and Windows 10/11 ships with tar in PowerShell (use tar -xzf file.tgz). macOS Finder double-click also unpacks .tgz via the built-in Archive Utility. Compatibility is one of the main reasons to convert from .tar.xz in the first place.

Can I convert from other archive formats to TGZ too?

Yes — see TAR to TGZ for an uncompressed TAR, TAR.GZ to TGZ (rename / repack), 7Z to TGZ, or RAR to TGZ. All variants preserve directory structure and produce a standard gzip-compressed TAR on the output side.