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In computing, ".bak" is a filename extension commonly used to signify a backup copy of a file.
When a program is about to overwrite an existing file (for example, when the user saves the document they are working on), the program may first make a copy of the existing file, with .bak
appended to the filename. This common .bak
naming scheme makes it possible to retrieve the original contents of the file in case of a failed write that corrupts the file, which could be caused by an
operating system crash, power outage, or disk space exhaustion.
Without the backup file, an unsuccessful write event may truncate a file, meaning it cuts off the file at a position, or leaves a blank file. In practice, this could cause a written document to become incomplete or get lost, a multimedia project file (e.g. from a video editor) to become unparseable, and user preferences being reset to default.
In a similar manner, a user may also manually make a copy of the file before the change and append .bak
to the filename, or alternatively save revisions into separate files, to facilitate reverting to an earlier revision in case of an error.
Other naming schemes are also in widespread use: file~
, file.orig
, file.old
, and appended time stamps.
Database Applications like
FoxPro and SQL Server use .bak
files to back up their databases and other applications, like
XML shell, create .bak
files in their
autosave process.
[1] They do not get automatically deleted, so they need to be manually deleted after the process using it is stopped.
This section contains a
list of miscellaneous information. (August 2022) |
This is a partial list of applications that generate .bak
files (in some cases as an optional configuration setting):
This article has multiple issues. Please help
improve it or discuss these issues on the
talk page. (
Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
In computing, ".bak" is a filename extension commonly used to signify a backup copy of a file.
When a program is about to overwrite an existing file (for example, when the user saves the document they are working on), the program may first make a copy of the existing file, with .bak
appended to the filename. This common .bak
naming scheme makes it possible to retrieve the original contents of the file in case of a failed write that corrupts the file, which could be caused by an
operating system crash, power outage, or disk space exhaustion.
Without the backup file, an unsuccessful write event may truncate a file, meaning it cuts off the file at a position, or leaves a blank file. In practice, this could cause a written document to become incomplete or get lost, a multimedia project file (e.g. from a video editor) to become unparseable, and user preferences being reset to default.
In a similar manner, a user may also manually make a copy of the file before the change and append .bak
to the filename, or alternatively save revisions into separate files, to facilitate reverting to an earlier revision in case of an error.
Other naming schemes are also in widespread use: file~
, file.orig
, file.old
, and appended time stamps.
Database Applications like
FoxPro and SQL Server use .bak
files to back up their databases and other applications, like
XML shell, create .bak
files in their
autosave process.
[1] They do not get automatically deleted, so they need to be manually deleted after the process using it is stopped.
This section contains a
list of miscellaneous information. (August 2022) |
This is a partial list of applications that generate .bak
files (in some cases as an optional configuration setting):