[Martha Liebrum]

My son saved all my stuff so he could do some work on the laptop. Then all the stuff that was saved, on an external drive, came back as .dat. I can't open them, without subscribing to a service that will open them all, I'm told. Is there anything to do?

[EvanDavis]

Originally Posted by Martha Liebrum

My son saved all my stuff so he could do some work on the laptop. Then all the stuff that was saved, on an external drive, came back as .dat. I can't open them, without subscribing to a service that will open them all, I'm told. Is there anything to do?

Hi Martha
Welcome to the forum. You could try using Dat Converter which is a free converter to convert your files, its going to be a long and slow process though as when whatever happend to change the extension to .dat you would have lost the original extension.

[Silverhazesurfer]

what kind of drive is this? I must stay away from that

what was the process that was taken to get the information on the drive? Sounds like it needs to go back through whatever software was used to remove it. Hopefully it isn't secure storage with encryption requiring keys from the original installation.