ZIP Converter

How to Convert a ZIP File

1. Upload Your ZIP Files: Drag your .zip archives into the drop zone or click "Add Files". You can add several at once.
2. Pick an Output Format: The Archive File Extension selector offers 7Z, RAR, TAR, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2, TAR.XZ, TGZ, TB2, TZ2 and ZIP, with 7Z preselected. On an archive-to-archive conversion each ZIP you upload becomes its own converted archive — the Combine control is fixed to Individual Archives here, so five ZIPs in means five files out rather than one merged bundle.
3. Let the Server Re-pack the Contents: The ZIP is unpacked on our servers and the files inside are re-bundled into the container you chose — DEFLATE inside your ZIP becomes gzip for a TAR.GZ, xz/LZMA2 for a TAR.XZ, or LZMA2 for a 7Z. Nothing inside the files is altered; only the wrapper changes.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the result. 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.

Popular ZIP Conversions

• ZIP to 7Z — the highest compression ratio of the common formats, when the recipient has 7-Zip or p7zip
• ZIP to TAR.GZ — the default bundle for Linux, Docker build contexts and source releases
• ZIP to TAR — an uncompressed bundle that preserves POSIX ownership and permission headers
• ZIP to TAR.XZ — the smallest tarball, at the cost of a slower compression pass
• ZIP to TAR.BZ2 — the bzip2 tarball still common in older Unix software distribution
• ZIP to RAR — for a workflow or recipient that specifically expects a RAR

If you have the opposite problem, 7Z to ZIP, TAR to ZIP and RAR to ZIP go the other way. To get the loose files rather than a different wrapper, use Extract ZIP; to build a ZIP from a pile of ordinary documents, use File to ZIP.

Why Convert a ZIP File?

ZIP is as close to universal as archives get. Phil Katz released the format through PKWARE in 1989 and put the specification in the public domain; it compresses each file individually with DEFLATE, the algorithm documented in IETF RFC 1951, and it is opened natively by Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, iOS and Android with nothing installed. It is even a formal standard in its own right — ISO/IEC 21320-1:2015 defines a constrained "Document Container File" profile of ZIP that normatively references PKWARE's APPNOTE, permits only stored and deflated entries, and forbids encryption. That profile is what sits underneath EPUB, OpenDocument and Office Open XML files.

All of which means most people never need to leave ZIP. You convert when something specific pushes you off it:

• You want a smaller download. ZIP's per-file DEFLATE is respectable but dated. 7Z (LZMA2) and TAR.XZ compress the whole set as one solid stream with a newer algorithm, which usually wins by a wide margin on many similar files — source trees, logs, CSVs. The catch is that neither opens by double-clicking on a stock Windows or macOS machine.
• A Unix toolchain demands a tarball. tar -xzf, a Dockerfile ADD, a configure && make release, most Linux packaging — all of these expect TAR or TAR.GZ, and a ZIP simply will not do.
• Ownership and permissions matter. TAR headers record the numeric uid and gid, the file mode, the modification time and the directory structure for every entry, which is why backups, deployments and reproducible builds live on tarballs. A ZIP produced by a Windows tool frequently carries none of that.
• A form or pipeline accepts exactly one format. Upload forms, CI jobs and legacy applications are often inflexible. Converting the container is faster than unpacking and re-packing by hand.

Archive Format Comparison

TGZ, TB2 and TZ2: The Extension Aliases

Three of the targets on this page are alternate spellings rather than distinct formats. They exist because older DOS and Windows filesystems allowed only a three-character extension, so archive.tar.gz had to become archive.tgz. The bytes are identical to their long-form equivalents:

Pick the long form unless something downstream insists otherwise — tar reads all of them, and .tar.gz tells a human what they are looking at. If a tool rejects a .tgz, renaming it to .tar.gz is a legitimate fix, because there is nothing different inside.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does converting a ZIP unpack the files onto my computer?

No. Converting changes the container, not your disk. The archive is unpacked on our servers, the same files are re-bundled into the format you chose, and you download one converted archive — your files stay packed, just in a different wrapper. If what you actually want is the loose files, use Extract ZIP, or your operating system's own unzip, which is built into Windows Explorer, macOS Finder and every Linux desktop.

Is converting ZIP to TAR.GZ or 7Z lossless?

The bytes inside your files never change. What changes is how they are packed: ZIP, gzip, bzip2, xz and LZMA2 are all lossless compression algorithms, so the archive is decompressed and recompressed with no data loss at any stage. Only the archive's size and internal structure differ. Note that plain TAR applies no compression at all, so a .tar will normally be larger than the ZIP it came from — that is expected, and it is why tarballs are almost always paired with gzip or xz.

Will I actually get a smaller file converting ZIP to 7Z or TAR.XZ?

Usually, and sometimes by a lot — but it depends entirely on the contents. ZIP compresses each file separately with DEFLATE, so it cannot exploit redundancy between files. 7Z and TAR.XZ compress the whole set as one stream with LZMA2, which is why archives of many similar files — source code, logs, CSV exports, XML — often shrink dramatically. Content that is already compressed will barely move in any format: JPEGs, MP4s, MP3s and most PDFs are already near their entropy limit, so a ZIP of photographs converted to 7Z comes out roughly the same size.

What should I convert a ZIP to for Linux or Docker?

TAR.GZ. It is the default bundle format for source releases, Docker build contexts and most Linux packaging, every Unix system reads it with tar -xzf, and its headers carry the ownership, mode and timestamps that a Windows-produced ZIP often drops. Use ZIP to TAR when you want the bundle uncompressed because a later stage will compress it, and ZIP to TAR.XZ when download size matters more than the time spent compressing.

Why can't I open a 7Z or TAR.GZ by double-clicking on Windows?

Because Windows Explorer and macOS Finder only handle ZIP out of the box. 7Z needs 7-Zip or an equivalent, and the TAR family needs tar — which does ship with modern Windows 10 and 11 on the command line, though not in the Explorer right-click menu. This is exactly why ZIP remains the right choice for sending files to a non-technical recipient, and why you convert to 7Z or a tarball only when you know the receiving end is a Linux box, a build server or someone with the tools installed.

I uploaded five ZIPs — why did I get five archives instead of one?

Because archive-to-archive conversion works file by file. Each uploaded archive is unpacked and re-packed into its own output, which is what you want when you are converting a batch of unrelated ZIPs — merging them would mix five separate projects into one tree. If your goal really is a single archive containing many inputs, upload the loose files to File to ZIP instead, which bundles everything you add into one archive.

Do file permissions and folder structure survive the conversion?

Folder structure and filenames always survive. Ownership and permission bits depend on what the source ZIP recorded. ZIP can store Unix mode bits, but archives created by Windows tools frequently do not, and there is nothing a converter can recover that was never written down. TAR-family targets store uid, gid, mode and mtime in every header, so converting to TAR.GZ preserves whatever attributes were present — and gives you somewhere to put them going forward. For deployments and backups where the exact mode matters, build the tarball from the original files rather than from a ZIP.

What happens to my archive and its contents after conversion?

Your ZIP is uploaded over an encrypted connection, unpacked and re-packed on our servers, and both the upload and the converted result are deleted automatically after a few hours. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and your archives are never shared or made public. Password-protected ZIPs are the one case to plan around: an encrypted archive cannot be re-packed without the password, so decrypt it locally first and convert the plain contents.