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Personal Digital Archiving

Provides guidance on organizing, archiving, backing up, and preserving your personal digital files in a variety of media formats, including text, photos, audio and video.

Audio Files

The preferred preservation formats for high quality audio are wav (uncompressed) or flac (compressed but without loss in quality).

For everyday use and lower (compressed) file size, aac is considered better quality than mp3, which is widely used for streaming and mobile devices.

Video Files

Preservation container formats for digital video (which also contains audio files) include avi and mov (Quicktime).

For lower file sizes, mp4 is a popular and widely supported container format for the H.264 video compression codec and aac audio codec.