Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your TAR file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert TAR to another file type
To convert TAR archives to another format, you need GNU tar or other Compressed software.
Convert a file to TAR
To convert other file formats to the "Tape Archive File" file type, you need software like GNU tar or a similar tool.
About TAR files
The .tar (Tape Archive) file format is a standard archive container used primarily in Unix, Linux, and POSIX-compliant systems. Originally designed for sequential tape drives, it bundles multiple files and directories into a single file while preserving file system attributes like permissions, dates, and directory structures. Today, it is widely used for software distribution, scientific data archiving, and application backups, including Microsoft Skype chat exports and PyTorch deep learning model checkpoints. You can open these files natively via the command line using GNU tar on Linux and macOS, or with third-party tools like 7-Zip and WinRAR on Windows. However, the .tar format has a massive disadvantage: it lacks native compression. A .tar file containing 50GB of data will consume exactly 50GB of disk space. This makes it highly inefficient for cloud storage, email attachments, or web transfers. Furthermore, extracting a single file from a massive archive can be painfully slow because the format requires sequential reading. Users without dedicated archive software on older Windows versions or mobile devices will also struggle to open these files. To fix these issues, you must convert or compress your .tar file. For maximum compatibility and compression, convert to ZIP, which is supported natively by all modern operating systems and mobile devices. For the highest compression ratio, convert to 7Z or compress it into a .TAR.GZ (Gzip) file.
Convert.Guru analyzes your TAR file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert TAR file to ZIP, MP4, CSV, TGZ, RAR, ISO, MP3, JSON, XML, YAML, YML or TOML, you can use GNU tar or similar software from the "Uncompressed File Archiving" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to TAR, try GNU tar or another comparable tool in the "Uncompressed File Archiving" category.
The TAR 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 TAR converter.