Convert LZO to TAR Online (Trading LZO's Speed Advantage for a Plain, Uncompressed Archive)

One Fast-Decompressing File Meeting Tar's Plain, Uncompressed Structure

A plain .lzo file is a single file compressed with lzop, the command-line tool Markus Oberhumer built around his own LZO (Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer) compression library and first released on August 10, 1997. Lzop's documentation is explicit that it works the way gzip does on a lone file: one input, one compressed output, with no concept of bundling several files together — a folder compressed this way becomes .tar.lzo (or its shorthand .tzo), never a bare .lzo. Plain TAR is something else entirely: an archiving format with no compression logic built into it at all, going back to its original tape-archive purpose of bundling files using 512-byte header blocks that record each entry's name, owner, permissions, and size.

Converting a raw .lzo file to plain .tar means decompressing the LZO-compressed data back to its original, uncompressed form with lzop first, then wrapping that recovered data inside tar's header-and-data block structure. Since a bare .lzo holds only a single compressed stream, this conversion typically produces a tar archive containing that one file as its only entry, unless additional files are deliberately bundled in alongside it during the tar step.

Every file lzop produces also opens with a fixed nine-byte magic sequence (0x89 0x4C 0x5A 0x4F 0x00 0x0D 0x0A 0x1A 0x0A), deliberately modeled on PNG's own signature so a corrupted or text-mode-mangled transfer fails loudly rather than silently. That header carries the original file's name, modification timestamp, and Unix permission bits — metadata a plain tar archive tracks too, but through its own standardized 512-byte header block format rather than a compressor-specific header field, so the underlying information survives the conversion even though its exact storage location changes.

Why This Conversion Removes Compression Rather Than Trading It

LZO's whole documented purpose is prioritizing decompression speed above nearly everything else, including how small the compressed file ends up. Its default lzo1x_1 method performs a simplified Lempel-Ziv-style scan for repeated byte sequences and deliberately skips the entropy-coding stage that gzip's DEFLATE, bzip2, and LZMA-based compressors all apply on top of their own matching — a design choice that keeps decompression genuinely fast but means the compressed file is still meaningfully smaller than the original, uncompressed data.

Plain TAR reverses that trade entirely rather than replacing it with a different compression method. GNU tar's own documentation describes the format as a sequence of 512-byte blocks — a header per file, followed by that file's data padded to the next 512-byte boundary, with two all-zero blocks marking the archive's end — and none of that structure shrinks the data at all. A 50 MB file stored in a tar archive takes up essentially the same 50 MB inside it, plus a small, fixed amount of header overhead, meaning the resulting plain tar archive is typically noticeably larger than the original .lzo file, in exchange for content that's immediately readable with zero decompression step required.

Independent benchmarks comparing lzop against gzip, bzip2, and lzma/xz consistently show it decompressing faster than all three, with compressing an entire Linux kernel source tree reported to take roughly one second with lzop, a noticeably longer task under the other compressors. Removing LZO compression entirely to get plain TAR means giving up even that fast, roughly one-second-scale decompression step, since reading a plain tar archive skips the decompression stage altogether rather than simply performing it more quickly than an alternative compressor would.

What Stripping LZO Compression for Plain Tar Changes

• Lose — the entire size reduction LZO provided: a plain tar archive stores data uncompressed, typically making it substantially larger than the original .lzo file.
• Gain — zero decompression time needed to read the data: extracting from a plain tar archive requires no decoding step at all, unlike LZO's (already fast, but still present) matching-based decompression process.
• Gain — Unix permissions and ownership recorded directly: tar's own header format stores file mode, owner, and group per entry, information lzop's header also stores but in a different, compressor-specific field rather than tar's standardized structure.
• Gain — native multi-file support: a single tar archive can hold any number of files and folders; a bare .lzo file holds exactly one compressed stream.
• Lose — any LZO-specific settings entirely: concepts like the lzo1x_1 versus lzo1x_999 method choice, which directly shaped the original .lzo file's compression, simply don't apply once the data has no compression layer at all.

Software That Bridges a Raw LZO File and a Plain Tarball

Decompressing the source .lzo file requires the lzop utility itself, or a tool built on its LZO library, since mainstream tools like 7-Zip and WinRAR generally don't include native LZO decompression at all. Lzop is typically a separate package on most Linux distributions (commonly named `lzop`) rather than something preinstalled by default, since the format is used almost exclusively in Linux, Unix, and embedded contexts.

GNU tar can create and read plain, uncompressed tar archives directly with no extra flags needed, since that's the format's original, default behavior before any compression option is layered on top; it can also drive lzop directly for the decompression step through its `--lzop` flag or the more portable `--use-compress-program=lzop` option, combining both steps in one command on systems where lzop is already installed. Plain tar archives themselves are then read by essentially every Unix-like system's built-in tar command, by 7-Zip and WinRAR on Windows, and by macOS's Archive Utility, with no special software required beyond what typically already ships on the system.

Why Someone Deliberately Removes Compression From a Raw LZO File

A documented, recurring reason involves feeding data into a pipeline or tool that will apply its own compression later with its own preferred algorithm and settings — decompressing the original .lzo file to plain tar first avoids compressing the same data twice, which wastes processing time without meaningfully shrinking the result any further, and can sometimes make the final output larger if two incompatible compression passes interfere with each other's pattern-matching.

A second real pattern shows up when the data inside a .lzo file needs to be inspected, edited, or processed by tools that can't read LZO-compressed streams directly and don't have lzop-aware libraries available — decompressing to a plain, uncompressed tar archive is the simplest way to make that content directly accessible without needing LZO-specific tooling at every later stage of a workflow.

A third scenario involves moving data over an already-fast, already-private connection, such as within a local network or between drives on the same machine, where LZO's speed advantage over other compressors stops mattering because no compression at all is even faster than LZO's fast-but-not-instant decompression — stripping compression entirely and working with a plain tar archive removes that remaining overhead completely for this specific kind of transfer.

A fourth pattern shows up in digital forensics and archival contexts where investigators or archivists deliberately avoid introducing any compression library into a chain of custody until it's strictly necessary, preferring to work from a plain, uncompressed tar archive whose contents can be hashed and re-verified at every stage without a decompression algorithm — even one as fast as LZO's — sitting between the analyst and the original bytes.

Raw LZO and Plain TAR Compared Directly

Questions About Converting a Raw LZO File to Plain TAR

Will the resulting tar file be bigger than the original .lzo file?
Yes, typically noticeably. A plain tar archive stores data uncompressed, so it generally matches the size of the original uncompressed content rather than the smaller size LZO's compression achieved.

Why remove compression instead of keeping the fast LZO format?
Mainly to avoid a redundant decompression step in a pipeline that applies its own compression later, or to make the data directly accessible to tools that can't read LZO-compressed streams without extra setup.

Does plain TAR preserve the file metadata lzop's header tracked?
Yes, in its own way. Tar's header blocks record file mode, owner, and group per entry directly, covering the same kind of permission information lzop's compressor-level header also stored, just organized in tar's own standardized structure instead.

Can a plain tar archive hold more than one file, unlike the original .lzo file?
Yes. Tar natively bundles any number of files and folders into one archive, while a bare .lzo file holds exactly one compressed stream and would have needed a separate archiving step to combine multiple files in the first place.

Should I compress the resulting tar archive afterward?
Often yes, if a smaller file for storage or transfer is the goal — pairing tar with gzip, bzip2, or xz restores compression using a format that natively supports multi-file archives, unlike the original single-stream .lzo format.

Does removing LZO compression make the file open any faster?
Marginally, yes — a plain tar archive skips the decompression step entirely, while even LZO's fast decoding still takes some measurable time, though the difference is usually small compared with LZO's already-quick decompression speed relative to other compressors.