ZIP ⇄ TAR.GZ converter

Two archive formats that think differently

ZIP and TAR.GZ solve the same problem with opposite philosophies. A ZIP compresses each file on its own and keeps an index at the end, so any single file can be pulled out without touching the rest — handy, and the reason ZIP became the everyday format on Windows. A tarball goes the other way: tar first glues every file into one long stream, then gzip compresses that stream as a whole. Compressing everything together often makes the result smaller when an archive holds many small, similar files, because patterns shared between files get compressed once instead of once per file — but nothing can be extracted without reading the stream from the start. Neither is better; they grew up on different systems, and this converter simply moves your files between the two worlds.

What survives the trip — and what does not

Your folder structure and every file's contents come through byte for byte — the conversion unpacks and repacks, it never re-encodes what is inside the files. What does not survive is the metadata around them. Repacked entries come out with standard permissions and without their original modification dates, which matters in one practical case: a shell script converted to a tarball loses its executable bit, so on Linux it needs a quick chmod +x after extraction before it will run. Very long paths deserve a mention too — the classic tar header stores about a hundred characters of path, so keep deeply nested folder names within reason. If exact permissions and dates genuinely matter, as they do for a system backup, create the tarball on the machine itself with the tar command; a format conversion is the wrong tool for that one job, and it is better to say so than to let you find out after a restore.

When you would actually bother

The traffic runs in both directions. Toward tarball: a Linux server, a CI pipeline or a colleague on the command line expects a .tar.gz, and you have a ZIP straight from Windows. Toward ZIP: an open-source release or a server backup arrives as .tar.gz and someone needs to open it with nothing but a double-click on Windows. In both cases the alternative is installing an archive tool or finding a command line — this page exists so that a thirty-second detour does it instead, without the archive leaving your machine. That last part is the quiet advantage of doing it in the browser: a source-code drop, a client's files or a folder of contracts never touches anyone's server, because there is no server involved at all — the conversion would work with your internet connection unplugged.

Limits worth knowing before a big archive

Everything here happens in your browser's memory, so the practical ceiling depends on your device — archives of a few hundred megabytes are usually fine on a desktop, while a tablet will tap out earlier. Password-protected archives are not supported in either direction; remove the protection first. And because conversion genuinely recompresses, the output size shifts a little either way — that is normal, not data loss. One route worth remembering: RAR archives cannot be created or converted directly to tarballs anywhere, but the RAR to ZIP tool gets a RAR into ZIP form first, and from there this page takes it the rest of the way.

How it works

The whole conversion runs in your browser using its built-in compression engine: the archive is unpacked, repacked in the other format and handed straight back to you. Nothing is sent to a server, so even large or private archives never leave your device.