Choose file format
Recommendations for the choice of a file format for long-term archiving.
For long-term archiving of your research data the files should be:
- unencrypted
- not compressed
- non-proprietary/patent-encumbered
- use an open, documented standard
The following file formats can be recommended:
- Tabular data: CSV, TSV, SPSS portable
- Text: TXT, HTML, RTF, PDF/A (only, if layout matters)
- Multimedia:
- Container: AVI, WAV, MP4, Ogg
- Codec: Theora, Dirac, FLAC
- Image: TIFF, JPEG2000, PNG
- Structured data: XML, RDF
To be avoided are the file formats:
- Tabular data: XLS
- Text: DOC, PPT
- Multimedia: Windows Media Video, QuickTime, H264
- Image: GIF, JPG
- Structured data: RDBMS