tar.bz2 is the default extension for bzip2-compressed tar archive. It is used instead of the typical tar.gz format when a higher compression rate is needed at the expense of CPU time required to compress and decompress an archive of this format.
tar.bz2 archive files can be extracted using the tar command at the terminal, which is included in most Linux distributions.
Related: How to extract tar.gz file in Linux
$ file file.tar.bz2 file.tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 900k
$ mkdir destination
cd destination/
$ tar --extract --bzip2 --verbose --file=/home/user/file.tar.bz2 #Simplified version: tar -xjvf /home/user/archive.tar.gz archive/ archive/subfolder-02/ archive/subfolder-02/filename-02 archive/subfolder-02/filename-01 archive/subfolder-01/ archive/subfolder-01/filename-02 archive/subfolder-01/filename-01
$ ls -R .: archive ./archive: subfolder-01 subfolder-02 ./archive/subfolder-01: filename-01 filename-02 ./archive/subfolder-02: filename-01 filename-02
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