Extract text from Minecraft world backups (DAT_OLD)
To convert DAT_OLD backups to another format, you need Minecraft or other Game software.
To convert other file formats to the "Game Backup Data" file type, you need software like Minecraft or a similar tool.
A .DAT_OLD file is an automated backup of a world state file created by Minecraft. Specifically, the game generates a level.dat_old file every time a world is loaded. This file acts as a failsafe if the active level.dat file becomes corrupted during gameplay. Under the hood, a .DAT_OLD file is formatted using Minecraft's proprietary NBT (Named Binary Tag) structure and is typically compressed with GZIP.
Because this is a highly specific game asset, standard file conversion to formats like PDF or JPG is impossible and unnecessary. If you try to open a .DAT_OLD file in a standard text editor, you will only see unreadable gibberish due to the GZIP compression and binary encoding. The primary reason users interact with this file is to recover a lost or corrupted Minecraft world. To do this, you do not need a converter; you simply rename the file extension from .DAT_OLD back to DAT.
If you want to view or edit the actual game variables (like player inventory, world seed, or spawn coordinates), you must use a specialized community tool like NBTExplorer. Standard online converters fail to process this format because they do not understand the NBT schema. However, you can still use convert.guru. Just drag and drop your file to identify the format, view the internal structure, and extract the underlying data. Because the file uses standard GZIP compression, our platform can often unpack the container to reveal the raw binary content inside.
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 Data 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 Data 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.