Extract text from TAZ files
To convert your TAZ file to another format, you need 7-Zip or other Compressed software.
To convert other file formats to the "Unix Archive" file type, you need software like 7-Zip or a similar tool.
A .TAZ file is a composite archive format that combines the functionality of a Tape Archive (.TAR) with the legacy Unix compress utility (.Z). Historically, this format was used to bundle multiple files into a single uncompressed tarball, which was then shrunk using Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression to save disk space. The extension is a shorthand for .tar.Z, necessitated by older file systems like MS-DOS that enforced an 8.3 filename character limit. While once standard on Unix systems, the format is now largely obsolete, having been superseded by more efficient compression algorithms like Deflate (.ZIP, .GZ) and LZMA (.7Z).
Handling .TAZ files today presents significant friction. Native support is virtually non-existent on modern operating systems like Windows and macOS, requiring users to hunt for third-party tools like 7-Zip or WinZip just to view the contents. Furthermore, the older LZW compression ratio is poor by modern standards, and the format lacks security features like encryption or password protection. Users typically encounter these files when recovering data from old backups or legacy Unix servers. To make the data accessible, the most practical solution is converting the .TAZ file to a ZIP archive, which can be opened natively on almost any device, or extracting it back to a standard TAR for Linux environments. For long-term archiving with better space savings, converting to 7Z is recommended.
Convert.Guru analyzes your TAZ file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted GZ, TBZ2, AR and ZIP files.
If you want to convert TAZ file to ZIP, RAR, 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, LZMA, CAB, ACE, ARJ or LHA, you can use 7-Zip or similar software from the "Compressed Archive Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert XXE, 7Z, Z, PAK, LHA, DEB, UUE, TAR, LZH, ZIP, PKG or RAR files to TAZ, try 7-Zip or another comparable tool in the "Compressed Archive Storage" category.
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 TAZ converter.