A tarball is a compressed archived file with file name extension generally ending in ".tar.gz".

It is created in a two-step process.

First, a large set of files is archived into one single file (with the file extension .tar) known as the tar file. This can be done using the Unix/Linux tar command. (The name tar has this origins from "tape archive".)

Then this tar file is compressed using a compression utility such as gzip, resulting in the tarball with the file extension .tar.gz.

On Windows, the free open-source utility program 7-zip can create and extract tarballs. Although you have to do it in two steps. For creation, you first tar the set of files and then gzip the tar file. For extraction, you unzip it and then un-tar it.

If you have a web host with cpanel, then you can use the File Manager to compress your webhost files into tarballs.

This tarball file is convenient for the loading to a Web server and also for backup purposes. The resulting tar file is smaller than the sum of all its files. And it can maintain the directory structure of the file set.