Although commonly the .DAT extension was used for a native data file, the extension .DAT is currently associated with several types of files. This is because of the popularity of the characters and many companies like Piriform are coming up with their own implementations of .DAT file to store data pertaining to their proprietary software.

In its native form, the .DAT file can be created by any third party application software on your pc and thus only the decoders of that particular application may be able to read and write the data in that file.