Recommended Archive Formats
Type of data | Preferred formats for management back-ups and data preservation | Other acceptable formats for data preservation |
---|---|---|
Quantitative tabular data with extensive metadata a dataset with variable labels, code labels, and defined missing values, in addition to the matrix of data |
SPSS portable format (.por) delimited text and command ('setup') file (SPSS, Stata, SAS, etc.) containing metadata information structured text or mark-up file containing metadata information, e.g. DDI XML file |
proprietary formats of statistical packages e.g. SPSS (.sav), Stata (.dta) MS Access (.mdb/.accdb) |
Quantitative tabular data with minimal metadata a matrix of data with or without column headings or variable names, but no other metadata or labelling |
comma-separated values (CSV) file (.csv) tab-delimited file (.tab) including delimited text of given character set with SQL data definition statements where appropriate
|
delimited text of given character set - only characters not present in the data should be used as delimiters (.txt) widely-used formats, e.g. MS Excel (.xls/.xlsx), MS Access (.mdb/.accdb), dBase (.dbf) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) |
Geospatial data vector and raster data |
ESRI Shapefile (essential - .shp, .shx, .dbf, optional - .prj, .sbx, .sbn) geo-referenced TIFF (.tif, .tfw) CAD data (.dwg)
|
ESRI Geodatabase format (.mdb) MapInfo Interchange Format (.mif) for vector data Keyhole Mark-up Language (KML) (.kml) Adobe Illustrator (.ai), CAD data (.dxf or .svg) binary formats of GIS and CAD packages |
Qualitative data textual |
eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) text according to an appropriate Document Type Definition (DTD) or schema (.xml) Rich Text Format (.rtf) plain text data, ASCII (.txt) |
Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) (.html) widely-used proprietary formats, e.g. MS Word (.doc/.docx proprietary/software-specific formats, e.g. NUD*IST, NVivo and ATLAS.ti
|
Digital image data | TIFF version 6 uncompressed (.tif) | JPEG (.jpeg, .jpg) TIFF (other versions) (.tif, .tiff) Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF/A, PDF) (.pdf) RAW image format (.raw) software-specific formats, e.g. Photoshop files (.psd) |
Digital audio data | Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) (.flac) Waveform Audio Format (WAV) (.wav) |
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) (.aif) |
Digital video data | MPEG-4 (.mp4) motion JPEG 2000 (.mj2) |
|
Documentation and scripts | Rich Text Format (.rtf) PDF/A or PDF (.pdf) HTML (.htm) OpenDocument Text (.odt) |
plain text (.txt) widely-used proprietary formats, e.g. MS Word (.doc/.docx) or MS Excel (.xls/.xlsx) XML marked-up text (.xml) according to an appropriate DTD or schema, e.g. XHMTL 1.0 |