“I’m going to reformat my hard drive and do a clean install of Windows because of a virus. What files should I back up, so far I got my pictures, videos, and Internet bookmarks. Is there anything else I might be overlooking?”
So far you got your most important files like your photos and videos which are irreplaceable, but there could be some other files you may have forgotten about. Although it’s a good idea to make a habit of saving files in a organized fashion sometimes we just save files in places we have forgotten about. It’s a good idea to do some searches for basic files extensions.
Click on the “Start” button and now in the “Start Search” box type in “*.fileextension” for example if I was looking for any Word documents I would begin my search with “*.doc” without the quotes of coarse or if I was looking for mp3’s I would type in *.mp3. So there’s 3 parts to it, the asterisk (*), the period (.) and then the file extension you want to search.
If you’re not sure what to search for here are some commonly used file extensions:
Pictures/Images – .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .psd (photoshop)
Movies/Videos – .wmv, .avi, .mpg, .avi, .mov, .mp4, .qt, .rm
Music Playlists – pls, fpl, m3u and m3u8
Excel – .xls
Word – .doc
Power Point – .ppt
Music – .mp3
iTunes – .m4p
Adobe – .pdf
If you need more file extensions to search for check here http://www.fileinfo.net/common.php
Don’t forget to save special applications you may have purchased or even downloaded games.
Don’t forget your bookmarks and browser preferences.
also try http://dotwhat.net/ as u can ask for help
Hi, at http://www.file-extensions.org could be found some interesting informations about file extensions and file formats.