Question Can I safely transfer some old files from a possibly infected computer ?

[Garfieldwxg55]

Hi, so recently I installed some emulators in my AppData, and also messed around with the permissions in my AppData folder, which I made a post about yesterday. Anyway, it seems that I will have to reinstall Windows. However, I have a few files that were important to me (a few images, a txt file, a word document, and some folders with game saves/mods). When I realised that I was having issues, and would probably have to reinstall Windows, I copied those files to a backup drive of mine.
Anyway, I was wondering if these files will be safe to access off my backup drive? Or whether I need to leave them?
Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[DSzymborski]

Exactly what did you do since the last thread you made? And what do you mean by "possibly infected?" That seems to refer to a virus, but you say absolutely nothing about this within the post itself.

 

[USAFRet]

What tools have you scanned these files with?
What leads you to think 'virus'?

I'd maybe suspect the game mods, but all the other are probably OK.
Key word.....probably.

 

[DSzymborski]

And that begs the question: why weren't these files that were "important to you" backed up, ideally in multiple places? Any data that isn't backed up is likely to be lost forever sooner or later. This is a basic part of responsible PC ownership.

 

[Garfieldwxg55]

Sorry, I should have linked the article from yesterday here:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...sible-ruin-my-computer.3799932/#post-22953103
And I was actually considering backing up some of the more important files. However I messed up before I could do that. I'm fairly certain that it's just an issue of ruining my AppData folder, but there is a small doubt in my mind that it could be a virus.
So I just want to see if these files would be safe to use or not.
Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[hotaru.hino]

Assuming somehow the virus slips past Windows Defender, the virus has to be executed in order for it to actually do anything. Executed as in, the data in it is run as instructions on the CPU. Most of the files in AppData are simply interpreted as data, meaning it won't be executed as instructions.

So is it safe to transfer them over? Probably.