Attempt to extract as a standard tar file instead of tar.gz try: with tarfile.open (file_path, 'r:') as tar: tar.extractall(extracted_path) Check the extracted folder structure again extracted_files = [] for root, dirs, files in os.walk(extracted_path): for file in files: extracted_files.append(os.path.join(root, file)) extracted_files[:20] # Display first 20 files and folders for brevity except tarfile.ReadError as e: extracted_files = str(e) extracted_files