What Is a BZ2 File?

This article explains what a BZ2 file is and how to open one on your computer or convert one to a different format like GZ, ISO, ZIP, etc.

What Is a BZ2 File?

A file with the BZ2 file extension is a BZIP2 compressed file. They're normally used only on Unix-based systems for software distribution.

BZ2 is often the compression used for popular file containers that don't support compression (like TAR files), so they may have a name like data.tar.bz2. One holding a compressed PNG image, for example, might be named something similar like image.png.bz2.

How to Open a BZ2 File

BZ2 files can be opened with 7-Zip and other compression/decompression programs. Of them, PeaZip is a good choice because it fully supports the format. This means it can open the file as well as compress a file using the BZIP2 compression method to make a BZ2 file.

You can open a BZ2 file on Windows 11 by simply double-clicking or double-tapping it. This doesn't work on older Windows versions, though, so if you have Windows 10, or Windows 8, etc., use one of the programs I mentioned above.

Apple's Archive Utility can open BZ2 files on a Mac for free, as can The Unarchiver. Some others for macOS include Incredible Bee's Archiver and Corel's WinZip, though neither are free to use past the trial.

Another option that works on all operating systems is B1 Online Archiver. It can open BZ2 files online in your web browser; no software download necessary.

You can use the free RAR app from RARLAB to open BZ2 files on an Android device. iOS users can install Zip Browser on iPhone or iPad.

Linux systems can extract the contents of the archive without any external software. Use this command in a terminal, but replace file.bz2 with your own file:

bzip2 -dk file.bz2

Files that are stored in a TAR file, but compressed with BZIP2, can be extracted with this command (again, replacing file.tar.bz2 according to the name of your own file):

tar xvjf file.tar.bz2

How to Convert a BZ2 File

The easiest way to convert this file to another archive format is to use one of the options from this list of Free File Converters for Occasionally Used Formats.

FileZigZag is one example that runs in your browser to convert BZ2 to GZ, ZIP, TAR, GZIP, TBZ, TGZ, 7Z, and other similar formats. Just upload the file to that website and choose which format to convert it to. You then have to download the converted file back to your computer before you can use it.

AnyToISO can be used to convert TAR.BZ2 files to ISO.

Since BZ2 files are archives, it means they're not in a "regular" format like PDF, MP4, TXT, CSV, etc., so you can't convert to one of those formats (i.e., BZ2 to TXT).

However, if you have a BZ2 file that contains one of those files, you can easily that file to a new format by just extracting it out of the archive with a file extractor like PeaZip. Finally, you can use a file converter on the TXT file (or whatever file you're working with) to save it to a new format.

Still Can't Open It?

If the file doesn't open after trying the suggestions above, the most likely reason is that you're not actually dealing with a BZ2 file. It's easy to do this if you've misread the file extension.

For example, BZZ and B2A are similar extensions, but they have nothing to do with an archive. The former extension is used for projects created by a program called BuzzBundle, and the latter for a text-based format. Attempting to open either with the archive openers above will probably result in an error.

BZA is another, but it, confusingly, is an archive and so it might be usable with the same programs described above. Files using that extension are created by IZArc.