AQZ Converter

Extract text from Ancestral Quest backups (AQZ)


Drop or upload your .AQZ file
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How to extract text from your AQZ file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your AQZ file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert AQZ to another file type

To convert AQZ backups to another format, you need Ancestral Quest or other Backup software.

Convert a file to AQZ

To convert other file formats to the "Genealogy Backup Archive" file type, you need software like Ancestral Quest or a similar tool.


About AQZ files

The .AQZ file is an Ancestral Quest Backup file. It contains a compressed archive of a user's family tree database, including genealogy records, notes, and sometimes multimedia attachments. It is primarily created and managed by Ancestral Quest, developed by Incline Software, and is closely related to the legacy Personal Ancestral File (PAF) system. The .AQZ format is proprietary and heavily tied to a specific desktop software. Users cannot natively open these files in web browsers, modern mobile apps, or competing genealogy platforms without encountering compatibility blocks. Sharing a raw .AQZ file often results in the recipient being unable to view the family tree, causing frustration when collaborating on genealogy research. The best approach for sharing is extracting the archive to retrieve the standard AQ database or exporting it to GED (GEDCOM) for universal compatibility with web platforms like FamilySearch or Ancestry. Because the core database structure is proprietary, standard online converters often fail to process .AQZ files natively. Only the original software can reliably export the full data structure to GED.

Convert.Guru analyzes your AQZ file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted GEDCOM files.


FAQ

If you want to convert AQZ file to , you can use Ancestral Quest or similar software from the "Genealogy Data Backup" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert files to AQZ, try Ancestral Quest or another comparable tool in the "Genealogy Data Backup" category.



The AQZ Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our AQZ converter.