How do I open a .bak file on Linux?
Solution 1
.bak
generally designates that the file is a backup copy of something, but other than that it gives preciously little information as to the actual file type.
Try looking at the output of the file
command, which studies the first few bits of the file to see if it recognizes it as a known filetype:
caleburn: ~/ >file image001.jpg
image001.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01
caleburn: ~/ >file oops.png
oops.png: PNG image data, 935 x 546, 16-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced
caleburn: ~/ >file zones.zip
zones.zip: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract
caleburn: ~/ >file eth2.pcap
eth2.pcap: tcpdump capture file (little-endian) - version 2.4 (Ethernet, capture length 96)
And so on, and so on. Once you know what type of file linux thinks it is, google should be able to suggest how to access it.
... Alternately, you can ask whoever sent it to you what the original filename was supposed to be and find out that way. :)
Solution 2
A .bak
file, as defined at FileInfo.net is a Windows or MacOS backup file. Also according to the site, you should likely open the .bak file with the program that originally created it. Currently, that is dependent on the type of .bak file.
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Comments
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mico over 1 year
I have received a file of .bak format, let it be
foo.bak
. I don't know if it is a MS-DOS file or Linux/Unix file. What I know is that I can't open it because my Linux (Ubuntu) does not give any hint how to open it.So, how I open this file?
Just to omit warnings about not knowing what I am doing:
Disclaimer: I received my file from a known place, it is not a virus. It is a soft copy of one system I should next work on. I just do not happen to know how to open it.
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Admin almost 13 yearsIt is most probably not a Linux backup: substituting .bak with .exe did not solve my problem.
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Admin almost 13 yearswhat do you mean by "soft copy of one system"?
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Admin almost 13 yearsI think they mean a backup image of a Windows Operating System
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Admin almost 13 yearshave you any idea (or possibility to find out) with which program this file was initially created?
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mico almost 13 years
file my_file.bak
command gave just data -
mico almost 13 yearsIt became clear this is a Windows file. Can this file then be opened in any way at Linux?
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drjors almost 13 yearsTo my knowledge, no. Generally speaking, a .bak file needs to be opened with the program that made it. For example,
ihatephp.php.bak
would need to be opened up by a PHP editor (or notepad/gedit
/nano
/vim
) after removing the.bak
part of the file. If the .bak is a Windows System backup, then you cannot open it on linux or ubuntu, as it requires Windows to restore from a backup file that it created. -
Shadur almost 13 yearsThat means that it doesn't recognize it as any kind of filetype it knows about -- and
file
knows a /lot/ of filetypes. You can try to extract a little more information about it by typingstrings foo.bak | less
and scrolling through the output to see if any of it makes sense. Beyond that, I reiterate that asking the person who sent it to you is your best bet. -
mico almost 13 yearsI now identified the file. It was not a program but it was a "database dump" of the data stored by that program. Thanks to all you guys!
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mico almost 13 yearsWhat also helped me on my task about Windows files: wine helps on running them in Linux :)
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Michael Mrozek over 11 yearsIt turned out to be a database dump; I'm not sure why you decided it was a tgz file