BZ2 to TAR Converter
FileFlip converts BZ2 to TAR entirely inside your browser, using libarchive compiled to WebAssembly. The file is never uploaded to a server: it is read off your disk, converted on your own machine, and saved back by the browser. That means no file-size limit, no queue and no account.
How do I convert a BZ2 file to TAR?#
- Drop your BZ2 file onto the converter at the top of this page, or click it to pick one from your computer. You can add as many as you like.
- Leave the target set to TAR and the conversion starts on its own. FileFlip downloads 1.0 MB of WebAssembly the first time and nothing after that, then runs libarchive on your own machine.
- Save the TAR file. Your browser writes it straight to your downloads folder, because there was never a server holding it.
Does converting BZ2 to TAR lose quality?#
No. Converting BZ2 to TAR does not touch the files inside the archive. Each member is read out and written back byte for byte, so only the wrapper around them changes and nothing is recompressed.
Is it safe to convert BZ2 files online?#
Yes, because nothing is uploaded. FileFlip converts BZ2 files inside the browser tab you already have open, using WebAssembly builds of the same engines a desktop converter would install. Your file is read from your own disk into the page's memory, and no request carrying it is ever made.
You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser's network panel, run a conversion, and you will see the engine come down and your file go nowhere. There is no upload, no server-side copy, no retention window, and no account tied to what you converted.
How FileFlip works lists every engine, its version and its download size, and shows how to check for yourself that nothing leaves your machine.
What BZ2 to TAR actually does to the file#
Converting BZ2 to TAR runs on libarchive, downloads 1.0 MB of WebAssembly the first time and nothing after that, copies the archived files through unchanged, keeps file contents, and drops file timestamps and file permissions.
| Engine | libarchive |
|---|---|
| Conversion path | 2 steps: BZ2 → the unpacked files → TAR |
| Downloaded to your browser | 1.0 MB, once, then cached by your browser |
| Quality | Lossless, contents copied unchanged |
| You get back | One file |
| Where it runs | On the page's own thread, so a very large file will make the tab wait |
What survives the conversion
| What is in the file | This conversion | Why |
|---|---|---|
| File contents | Kept | Carried through into the converted file. |
| File timestamps | Dropped | The target format has nowhere to put it. |
| File permissions | Dropped | The target format has nowhere to put it. |
Worth knowing before you start:
- the built-in ZIP and TAR writer records no timestamps, permissions, or ownership
- every entry is extracted into memory before anything is written, so a very large archive can exhaust it
- this conversion runs on the page's own thread, so a large file will freeze the tab while it works
What is a BZ2 file?#
A BZ2 file is a single stream compressed with Julian Seward's bzip2, which sorts each 100-900 KB block through a Burrows-Wheeler transform before Huffman coding it, trading compression speed for a smaller result than DEFLATE typically achieves.
Use BZ2 for text-heavy data where its tighter compression than gzip is worth the slower compression time.
Convert BZ2 to XZ when an even smaller archive is worth the additional compression time, or to GZ when compression speed matters more than ratio.
What is a TAR file?#
A TAR file concatenates files, directories and 512-byte headers recording each item's owner, permissions and modification time into one stream, a format Unix introduced in 1979 for writing straight to magnetic tape with no compression involved.
Use TAR when file ownership, permissions and symlinks have to survive the trip, which matters for backups and Unix software distribution and doesn't matter for a folder of photos.
Convert an uncompressed TAR to a compressed variant like TGZ or TXZ when the archive is being stored or transferred and its size actually matters.
BZ2 to TAR questions people ask#
Can bzip2 hold more than one file?
No, bzip2 compresses a single file or stream just like gzip, so archiving several files as .bz2 means tarring them first into a .tar.bz2, or .tbz2.
Is bzip2 better than gzip?
bzip2 usually compresses noticeably smaller than gzip, especially on text, because its Burrows-Wheeler transform finds redundancy that DEFLATE misses. The cost is speed: bzip2 compression is markedly slower and needs more memory, sometimes cited at up to four times gzip's.
Why does bzip2 compress in blocks?
bzip2 splits its input into blocks of 100 KB to 900 KB and runs the Burrows-Wheeler transform, move-to-front coding and Huffman coding on each block independently. That block structure is also what lets tools like pbzip2 compress a bzip2 file's blocks in parallel across multiple CPU cores.
Is bzip2 still worth using over xz?
For most jobs, no: xz built on LZMA2 usually compresses smaller than bzip2 and decompresses faster, which is why most Linux distributions moved their package compression from bzip2 to xz. bzip2 still shows up in older tooling and pipelines that were built around it.