# Create tar / tar.gz Online - No Command Line Needed

> Free online tar tool: pack files or a whole folder into .tar or .tar.gz with the folder structure intact, built in your browser and never uploaded.

- URL: https://qilingtools.com/en/tar
- Category: Productivity (https://qilingtools.com/en/office)
- Tags: [Compression](https://qilingtools.com/en/tags/compress), [Productivity](https://qilingtools.com/en/tags/office)
- Last updated: 2026-10-26
- Price: Free, no sign-up
- Privacy: Runs locally in the browser; files are never uploaded

Build tar and tar.gz archives right in the browser — no command line, no upload. Handy on Windows, where there is no tar at hand but the file has to go to a Linux box. Output is standard ustar, so GNU tar and bsdtar open it without complaints.

## How to use

1. Click "Add files" or "Add folder", or just drop things in
2. Pick .tar (no compression) or .tar.gz (gzip), and name the archive
3. Click "Create archive" and download it

## Features

- Standard ustar format, readable by the tar command
- Whole folders with subdirectories preserved
- gzip via the browser's native compressor
- Long paths handled with the GNU extension, never truncated

## FAQ

### tar or zip — which should I use?

tar only concatenates files into one stream without compressing, which is why it is usually piped through gzip into .tar.gz; it preserves Unix paths and permissions and is the default on Linux. zip compresses on its own and opens with a double-click on Windows and macOS. Send tar.gz to a server, zip to a person.

### Why no .tar.xz or .tar.bz2?

Browsers only ship gzip natively; xz and bzip2 would need extra compression libraries that are large and slow in JavaScript. Compress those locally if you need them. Extraction is a different story — the RAR / 7Z extractor reads all of them.

### Will non-ASCII filenames survive?

Yes. Names are written as UTF-8, which every modern tar (GNU tar, bsdtar, 7-Zip) reads as UTF-8.

### How large an archive can it build?

File contents are streamed in rather than loaded into memory, so multi-gigabyte inputs are fine. The finished archive is held by the browser before download, so extremely large results are bounded by available memory.

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