Create TAR.BZ2 tarballs.
Tarballs with bzip2 compression — built in your browser.
Drop any files here
or browse your files
Paste with ⌘V · or drop files anywhere on the page
Files never leave your device. Everything runs in your browser, nothing touches a server — tools you've used even work offline.
Bundle any files into a .tar.bz2 right in your browser — tar joins them, bzip2 squeezes them, nothing is uploaded. The classic unix pairing for source trees and text-heavy payloads, built without touching a terminal.
How it works
- Drop files anywhere on the page, click to browse, or paste with ⌘V.
- Pick a quality or preset — or set an exact target size and let the tool find it.
- Compress, compare before/after, and download — individually or as a ZIP.
Where bz2 sits between gz and xz
bzip2 lands noticeably smaller than gzip on text and source code, at a real speed cost — the middle child of the tarball family. Create TAR.GZ stays the fast, maximally compatible default; Create TAR.XZ squeezes hardest of the three. Compressing single files without the tar wrapper is Bzip2 files.
Where .tar.bz2 survives today
bzip2’s decade as the ratio champion ended when xz arrived, and new projects rarely pick it — but the format is far from dead. Long-lived build pipelines and Makefiles stay pinned to the .tar.bz2 they were written against, mirrored archives keep historical releases in the format their checksums were published for, and a mountain of scientific datasets was archived in it during the 2000s.
It also kept one technical card: bzip2 compresses in independent 900 KB blocks, which makes parallel decompression natural — tools like pbzip2 saturate every core, something classic single-stream gzip cannot do. If a consumer on the other end expects .tar.bz2, producing exactly that here is the whole point of this page.
Frequently asked questions
Why choose bz2 over gz?
Better ratios on text, logs and source trees — typically 10–20% smaller than gzip — in exchange for slower compression. For payloads downloaded many times, the trade pays for itself.
Will Windows open a .tar.bz2?
7-Zip, WinRAR and PeaZip all open it; stock Explorer does not. For non-technical recipients a ZIP is the friendlier handoff — tarballs are for unix-shaped destinations.
Is there a file-size limit?
Only your device’s memory — nothing is uploaded, so no server cap applies. Multi-hundred-MB bundles are routine.
Is it private?
Yes. Archives are built and converted entirely in your browser — neither the archive nor the files inside it are ever uploaded, and any password you set is applied locally. The server does nothing but deliver this page. Want proof? Run one file through, switch your connection off, and run another — it still works.