Extract text from DAT_OLD files
To convert your DAT_OLD file to another format, you need Minecraft or other Game software.
To convert other file formats to the "Level Data Backup" file type, you need software like Minecraft or a similar tool.
A .DAT_OLD file is fundamentally a safety backup of the standard level.dat file used by Minecraft. When the game saves your world progress, it automatically renames the existing data file to this extension before writing the new one. This ensures that if the write process fails or the game crashes, a slightly older but valid version of the world data exists.
The primary difficulty for users is that .DAT_OLD files are not recognized by the game or most editors in their current state. They are typically GZIP-compressed Named Binary Tag (NBT) files. Because they are binary archives, opening them in a text editor like Notepad++ results in unintelligible garbled text. Furthermore, they are essentially 'locked' away from use until their extension is corrected.
To 'convert' or use this file for gameplay, the most practical method is renaming the extension from .DAT_OLD to DAT, replacing the corrupted level.dat in your save folder. For technical inspection or debugging world data, the best target format is JSON or raw NBT. Specialized tools like NBTExplorer are required to parse the internal structure, but online converters can quickly translate this binary data into readable text formats for analysis.
Convert.Guru analyzes your DAT_OLD file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted DAT, NBT, ZIP, DB, JPG, MCH, MCA and LANG files.
If you want to convert DAT_OLD file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Minecraft or similar software from the "Minecraft World Backup" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to DAT_OLD, try Minecraft or another comparable tool in the "Minecraft World Backup" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our DAT_OLD converter.