TAR.XZ (TXZ) Converter
Convert files to and from tar.xz online
About format
TAR.XZ is a compound archive format combining TAR) archiving with XZ compression, developed by the Tukaani Project and led by Lasse Collin since 2009. The TAR layer bundles files preserving Unix metadata, and XZ applies LZMA2 compression within a robust container featuring CRC-32 and CRC-64 integrity checks, padding support for media storage, and a stream/block structure enabling parallel decompression. LZMA2 improves on LZMA with better handling of incompressible data and multi-threaded compression support. TAR.XZ has become the preferred distribution format for many open-source projects — the Linux kernel, GNU core utilities, and numerous other packages ship their source tarballs as .tar.xz files. One advantage is the best compression-to-decompression-speed ratio among widely supported formats — XZ achieves compression ratios comparable to 7Z while decompressing faster than bzip2, an ideal combination for software distribution. The built-in integrity verification is another strength: unlike raw LZMA streams, the XZ container includes checksums that detect corruption before data reaches the application layer. GNU tar supports TAR.XZ natively via the -J flag, and xz-utils are packaged in every major Linux distribution. The format has effectively replaced TAR.GZ and TAR.BZ2 as the default for source code distribution in the open-source ecosystem.