The Format Expiry Date: Five File Types Racing Toward the Junkyard

File formats rarely announce their deaths. There's no final update, no warning banner. A format just fades out of every modern app until the day you double-click something important and Windows shrugs at you. The folks who lived through the Zip drive era know exactly how this movie ends.

Here are five formats currently on the endangered species list — and the fastest way to move your files somewhere safer.

1. Flash Video (.FLV)

The format that built the early web video era is functionally orphaned. Adobe killed Flash Player in 2020, and while VLC and a few players still open FLV files, nothing records in it, nothing edits it natively, and support is decaying year by year.

Migrate to: MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio. Use HandBrake (free) for batch conversions. If you have a folder of old FLV downloads, an afternoon of queueing them through HandBrake buys you another fifteen years of compatibility.

2. Older Camera RAW Variants

Every camera maker has a proprietary RAW format, and every few years they abandon the old ones. Shoot with a Canon from 2007 or an early Sony mirrorless, and you may already notice newer software versions dragging their feet on support. Once an OS or app update drops a legacy decoder, those files become digital negatives you can't develop.

Migrate to: DNG (Digital Negative), Adobe's open, documented RAW container. The free Adobe DNG Converter handles batch jobs. Keep the originals on cold storage if you're sentimental, but DNG is the copy you can actually rely on.

3. Proprietary Project Files (.PSD-era cousins, old DAW sessions, legacy CAD)

This one's sneakier because it's not one format — it's a whole category. Old Photoshop documents are mostly fine, but projects from defunct apps — a discontinued audio workstation, an abandoned video editor, ancient CAD files — are time bombs. When the vendor folds or the app stops running on modern Windows, your project file becomes a tombstone.

Migrate to: exported, open formats. Render audio projects to WAV or FLAC stems. Export video projects to a master file plus a project archive. Export CAD to STEP or DXF. And for anything still active, save a flattened export alongside the project file every time you close it. The project file is a working document; the export is your insurance policy.

4. Windows Media formats (.WMV, .WMA)

Microsoft itself has moved on. WMV still opens in Windows, but support elsewhere — phones, TVs, smart devices, web players — is evaporating. If your media library has WMV files ripped from the mid-2000s, they're already the least portable thing you own.

Migrate to: MP4/H.264 again. Same HandBrake workflow, same result. There's no quality advantage to staying put.

5. Old Office Formats (.DOC, .XLS, .PPT)

The pre-2007 binary Office formats still open in Word and Excel, but Microsoft has been actively deprecating them, and other software increasingly treats them as a compatibility afterthought. Worse, old formats carry macro-based malware risk that modern security tools flag aggressively.

Migrate to: the open XML formats — .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX. A batch 'Save As' pass, or LibreOffice's command-line converter if you've got hundreds of files, closes this one out in an evening.

The Deadline Nobody Gives You

Here's the uncomfortable truth: conversion gets harder, not easier, over time. The tools that open legacy formats exist now. In ten years, you may need to hunt down old software just to run the converter. The cheapest moment to migrate your archive is today, while every door is still unlocked.

Pick one format from this list, block out a Saturday morning, and batch-convert. Your future self — the one frantically Googling 'how to open FLV' at midnight — will send thanks.