TZ2 to RAR Converter

How to Convert TZ2 to RAR Online

1. Upload Your TZ2 File: Drag and drop or click "+ Add Files" to add one or more .tz2 archives (also recognized as .tbz2, .tb2, or .tar.bz2). Batch upload is supported and your originals stay untouched — a new RAR is written alongside them.
2. Pick Archive Mode: Default is Single Archive, which unpacks each TZ2 and combines the contents into one merged RAR. Switch to Individual Archives when you want one RAR per uploaded TZ2 (the inner file tree is preserved).
3. Confirm Output Format: RAR is already selected as the output extension. If you change your mind, switch the dropdown to 7z, zip, tar, or tar.gz without re-uploading.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. We decompress the bzip2 stream, untar the inner archive, and repack the file tree as a RAR5 archive. Downloads start as soon as each file finishes — no sign-up, no watermark.

Why Convert TZ2 to RAR?

A .tz2 file (also written .tbz2, .tb2, or .tar.bz2) is a tar archive squeezed through the bzip2 block-sorting compressor — the standard way Linux and Unix projects ship source tarballs. RAR (Roshal Archive), created by Eugene Roshal and first released in 1993, is a proprietary format that compresses 10–30% tighter than ZIP on mixed media and is still the format of choice for game mods, scanlation packs, and large bundles that need recovery records. Converting TZ2 to RAR is useful when the recipient already lives in the WinRAR world, or when you want RAR's multi-volume split, AES-256 encryption, and built-in error correction on top of the original payload.

• Sending bundles to Windows users who already have WinRAR — RAR's installed base on Windows is enormous, and File Explorer in Windows 11 22H2+ can now extract .rar natively (added with the September 2023 23H2 update via libarchive). Recipients who run Windows 10 or older almost always have WinRAR or 7-Zip already, both of which open RAR.
• Game mods, scanlations, and forum downloads — communities that distribute large packs frequently default to multi-volume RAR (.part1.rar, .part2.rar) because of RAR's recovery records and split-volume support. Repacking a .tar.bz2 source dump as RAR puts it in the right idiom for those audiences.
• Recovery records for unreliable transfers — RAR can embed redundant data that lets the archive survive a few bad sectors or a flaky download. bzip2 has no such layer; a single corrupted byte in a .tar.bz2 can break everything past it.
• AES-256 password protection — TZ2 has no encryption of its own (you have to wrap it in GPG). RAR5 supports AES-256 encryption of both file data and the filename listing, which is convenient for one-off password-protected hand-offs.
• Multi-volume splits for size-limited transfers — RAR's built-in volume split (.part1.rar, .part2.rar, …) is still one of the smoothest ways to break a multi-gigabyte archive across USB sticks, Discord's 10 MB free attachment cap, or a flaky upload that needs resumable chunks.
• Repacking a Linux tarball for a Windows-first workflow — if your CI artifact arrives as .tar.bz2 but your downstream packaging step expects .rar, this conversion saves the manual decompress-then-recompress round-trip.

TZ2 vs RAR — Format Comparison

Archive Format Quick Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Is .tz2 the same as .tar.bz2, .tbz2, and .tb2?

Yes — all four extensions describe a tar archive that has been compressed with bzip2. The byte contents are identical; only the filename suffix differs. The short .tz2 and .tb2 forms came from legacy DOS and 8.3 filesystem habits, plus a handful of older FTP servers and mail clients that choke on filenames with two dots. xconvert recognizes all four spellings interchangeably.

Will the RAR file be larger or smaller than the original TZ2?

It depends on the payload. On text-heavy or source-code archives, bzip2 often beats RAR by a small margin, so the RAR may end up 0–10% larger. On mixed media (images, audio, executables), RAR usually catches up or wins, and the result is often the same size or slightly smaller. If size is the priority and the recipient is comfortable with another format, 7z typically beats both bzip2 and RAR with LZMA2.

Can you create password-protected or encrypted RAR archives in the browser?

Not from this conversion page. RAR5 supports AES-256 encryption of file data and the filename listing, but xconvert's TZ2-to-RAR pipeline currently produces unencrypted archives. If you need password protection, do the conversion here, then re-pack the result locally with WinRAR (or 7-Zip's RAR support is read-only, so use WinRAR's -hp<password> flag for filename encryption too).

Does the converter preserve Unix file permissions, symlinks, and modification times?

RAR5 stores Unix attributes (mode, owner UID/GID, mtime, symlinks) in the per-file header, and our converter writes those fields when they are present in the source TZ2's tar header. Most Windows GUIs ignore Unix metadata and unpack everything as regular files owned by the current user; if permissions and symlinks matter, extract on Linux or macOS with unrar x (preserves attributes by default) or keep the archive in a tar-based format.

Why is creating RAR usually paid but extracting it free?

The RAR format and its compression algorithm are proprietary to RarLab. WinRAR is technically shareware — you can use it for free during the 40-day trial, and most people just keep using it after — but commercial creation of .rar files requires a paid licence (around USD 29 for a single user as of 2026, with multi-seat discounts). Extraction has always been free: RarLab publishes an open-source unrar source-available library that 7-Zip, libarchive, Keka, and xconvert all build on.

Does Windows 11 open .rar natively now, or do I still need WinRAR?

For reading RAR files, you no longer need WinRAR on Windows 11 version 23H2 or later (released September 26, 2023). File Explorer can extract .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, .tar.xz, and several other archive formats via the bundled libarchive library. Password-encrypted RAR archives still need a third-party tool. Creating RAR archives from File Explorer is not supported yet — Microsoft has indicated future updates may add this, but on Windows 11 today you still need WinRAR (or this converter) to produce them.

Why use RAR instead of ZIP if the recipient is on Windows?

Three reasons people still pick RAR over ZIP in 2026: (1) recovery records — RAR can embed redundant data that survives limited corruption; ZIP cannot. (2) Multi-volume archives — RAR's .part1.rar/.part2.rar split is cleaner than ZIP's .z01/.z02 split and is what most game-mod and scanlation communities expect. (3) Slightly better compression on mixed media. If none of those matter, ZIP is the more universal choice — every OS opens it without a third-party tool.

What is the file size limit for this converter?

A single upload is capped well above typical source-tarball sizes (most .tar.bz2 files in the wild are under 200 MB). For multi-gigabyte archives, split with tar --tape-length=2000000 first to produce ~2 GB volumes, or use the Individual Archives mode to convert each TZ2 separately and let RAR's native volume split handle the rest.

Do you keep my files after conversion?

Files are processed on our servers and removed shortly after your session ends. We do not index, share, or inspect the contents. For sensitive payloads, encrypt with GPG before uploading and decrypt the resulting RAR locally — or pick a format that has built-in encryption like 7z. For the reverse direction, see RAR to TAR.BZ2.