To ensure long-term access and reusability of your data, the DSBU encourages you to deposit and share your files using standard preservation and Open file formats most likely to be accessible in the future.
As technology evolves, it is important to consider which file formats you will use for preserving files in the long run.
File formats most likely to be accessible in the future have the following characteristics:
- Non-proprietary
- Open, documented standard
- Popular format
- Standard representation
- Unencrypted
- Uncompressed
Recommended Standards Files format from our service for data sharing or archiving (ranked in descending order of preference):
Text:
• PDF/A
– PDF/X
• Plain text (.txt)
• Open Office (.odt)
• XML / HTML (with schema)
• Word XML (.docx)
• RTF
• LaTeX
Images:
• Bitmap
– TIFF (uncompressed)
– PNG
– JPEG2000
– (GIF)
• Vector
– SVG
Tabular data:
• CSV (comma, tab, semi-colon)
• Open Office (.ods)
• XML / HTML (with schema)
• Excel (.xlsx)
• .SQL
Video:
• MPEG-4 (H.264) (~ MP4)
• Motion JPEG 2000
• MPEG-1/2
Audio:
• WAV (preferably Broadcast Wave Format, LPCM)
• AIFF (LPCM)
• OGG Vorbis
• MP3 MPEG Layer III
• AAC MPEG-4